The OpenText Process Suite ABC Glossary - Application Connector

Application Connector

An application connector is a software component that implements the connectivity between the OpenText Process Suite (OTPS) platform and an (external) application, data source or database. The application connectors are used to run the different types of web service operations.

A web service operation consists of two components:

1.         The WSDL (Web Service Definition Language) based on XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) defining the input data structure(s) to be consumed by the web service and the output data to be returned as a result of the execution of the web service.
2.       The implementation, the native code of the web service operation implementing its functionality. Application connectors contain the appropriate software to execute the implementation of these web services.

With the OTPS platform, when you create a service container to handle the execution of the available web services you start with selecting the type of application connector to next select the associated group of web services that are implemented through that type of connector and will be handled by this service container. When the web service operation is requested, the routing mechanism of the OTPS platform will determine the relevant service group and included service container(s) based of the name space associated with the web service. The OTPS platform web gateway will pass the request to the identified service container, which will load the implementation of the web service and pass it to the application connector that is capable of executing the native code of the implementation. For example, the built-in core WS-AppServer application connector is capable of executing both SQL and Java code of implemented web services.

With the OTPS platform you can distinguish two types of application connectors:

1.         Platform or core (technology) application connectors

These type of connectors are already built-in with the platform to facilitate the execution of web services to access the functionality of the OTPS platform itself, e.g. Business Process Management, BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) or some types of core applications for example, relational database systems by using the WS‑AppServer connector, externally based web services by means of the built-in UDDI connector. 

2.       Custom application connectors

Application connectors that can be added to the instance of the OTPS platform in order to support connectivity to other technologies or type of applications. For example, you can additionally deploy the File connector to enable file and directory access to the local file system of the OTPS platform. In the OTPS technical community you can find more information on the available custom application connectors in the connector directory that you can download and add to the platform: https://wiki.cordys.com/display/dsc/Connector+Directory

The OpenText Process Suite (OTPS) platform application connectors are an important component of the SOA (Services Oriented Architecture) layer in order to leverage the connectivity of the OTPS platform to different software environments.

The OpenText Process Suite ABC Glossary contains a description of the important keywords and concepts of the OpenText Process Suite (OTPS) platform. It is not meant to be a complete list but can help you to master and comprehend the most important concepts and technologies of the OTPS platform. You can also find a list of abbreviations below that are used with the descriptions of the listed keywords.

List of abbreviations 

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