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The OpenText Process Suite ABC Glossary - Application Connector

Written by Sascha Cutura | 10 September 2015

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. 

  1.       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 

Abbreviation Description
 ANSI  American National Standards Institute
 BAM  Business Activity Monitoring
 BER  Business Event Response
 BPML  Business Process Modeling Language
 BPMN   Business Process Modeling Notation
 BPMS   Business Process Management Suite (or System)
 CAL   Composite Application Logging (framework)
 CAP  Cordys / Composite Application Package (file extension)
 CARS  Cordys Admin Repository Server
 CMC   Cordys Management Console
 CWS  Collaborative Work Space
 DTAP   Development, Testing, Acceptance and Production
 ESB   Enterprise Service Bus
 HW   HardWare
 IDE   Integrated Development Environment
 IP   Internet Protocol
 JVM   Java Virtual Machine
 KPI   Key Performance Indicator
 LDAP   Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
 OMG   Object Management Group
 OTPS   OpenText Process Suite
 PIM   Process Instance Manager
 PMO   Process Monitoring Object
 RDBMS   Relational DataBase Management System
 SCM   Software Configuration Management
 SCXML   State Chart XML
 SOA   Services Oriented Architecture
 SOAP   Simple Object Access Protocol
 SSU   State Sync-Up
 SVN   SubVersioN
 SW   SoftWare
 WfMC   Workflow Management Coalition
 WSDL   Web Service Definition Language
 XML   eXtensible Mark-up Language
 XPDL   XML Process Definition Language

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