356 Ch. 16 Service-Oriented Logical Architecture Principles
Adapters are typically furnished along with off-the-shelf vendor products or provided as
libraries that can programmatically be applied to specific installations. For example, the SUN
J2EE platform offers J2EE connector architecture (JCA)5 technology that fosters interoperability
standards between diverse enterprise systems. The IBM??™s CICS Transaction Gateway6 is another
example of the adapter technology??™s protocol and data transformation bridging benefits. This
connector can facilitate seamless communication between J2EE and mainframe applications;
it accesses CICS mainframe regions by employing external call interfaces (ECI) and external
presentation interfaces (EPI).7
USING AGENT TECHNOLOGY. ???Agent??? is a conceptual term that depicts functionality of an
autonomous software component that offers a unique contribution to technological environment
interoperability challenges.8 An agent is another type of connector that is configured and operates
on a service or application premise. It is typically involved in information-gathering and monitoring
activities rather than in transaction management or intensive message-exchange activities.
In the SOA world, an agent is characteristically tuned to environmental events to monitor
quality of services (QoS), security profiling, enforcement of service-level agreements (SLA), and
service reusability and consumption rates.
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