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BEA eLink Adapter for Portal Infranet Overview

 

This chapter contains the following topics:

 


BEA eLink Solution Overview

BEA eLinkTM provides an open Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solution that allows applications throughout organizations to communicate seamlessly. Using EAI, you gain the long-term flexibility and investment protection you need to keep up with today's ever-changing business environment.

Typically, companies use packaged applications to automate internal operations, such as financial, manufacturing, human resources, etc. While they successfully address the needs of these specific areas, these proprietary platforms often do not work together. To compete today, you need a much greater exchange of information. Systems need to communicate at a process level within your own organization, as well as with customer's and supplier's systems. BEA eLink Platform is the underlying basis of BEA eLinkTM, a family of off-the-shelf enterprise application integration (EAI) products that leverage BEA's transaction platform to integrate existing legacy applications with customer-focused and business-to-business e-commerce initiatives.

BEA eLink Platform provides a proven infrastructure for integrating applications within the enterprise and across the Web. BEA eLink Platform ensures high-performance, secure transactions and transparent access to mission-critical applications and information throughout the enterprise and across the Web. Figure 1-1 illustrates the eLink logical architecture and shows where the eLink Adapters fit into the process.

Figure 1-1 BEA eLink Solution Illustration

The entire BEA eLink family (including all options and adapters) is highly scalable. Multiple instances of BEA eLink components can collaborate so that work is divided between eLink domains. BEA eLink includes SNMP integration for enterprise management.

The current BEA eLink Platform leverages the BEA TUXEDO infrastructure because it is based on a service-oriented architecture. Both BEA TUXEDO and BEA eLink communicate directly with each other and with other applications through the use of services. Multiple services are grouped into "application servers" or "servers". The terms, TUXEDO services/ servers and eLink services/servers can be used interchangeably. Because this document is specifically addressing the eLink family, the term "eLink service" and "eLink server" is used throughout.

The BEA eLink Platform complies with the Open Group's X/Open standards including support of the XA standard for two-phase commit processing, the X/Open ATMI API, and XPG standards for language internationalization. C, C++, COBOL, and Java are supported. The BEA eLink Platform connects to any RDBMS, OODBMS, file manager or queue manager, including a supplied XA-compliant queueing subsystem.

The following components operate with BEA eLink Platform:

 


BEA eLink Adapter Feature Overview

The eLink Adapter for Portal Infranet is an eLink Platform server that allows Portal Infranet functionality to be invoked in the form of services from a eLink Platform environment. Portal Infranet business services are advertised as eLink Platform services. Figure 1-2 shows the relationship of the eLink Adapter for Portal Infranet with eLink Platform and Portal Infranet.

Figure 1-2 The eLink to Portal Infranet Transfer Process

This section contains overview information for each of these topics:

What is Portal Infranet?

Portal Infranet is a customer management and billing system designed for IP-based businesses. It uses a database to integrate and store service information such as pricing models, business policies, and customer information. Portal Infranet supports the following business tasks:

What is eLink Adapter for Portal Infranet?

The eLink Adapter for Portal Infranet is an eLink Platform server that allows functionality within Portal Infranet to be invoked from the eLink Platform environment. Each unique Portal Infranet function that can be invoked is advertised as a unique eLink Platform service. This service can be invoked using request and response are FML32 buffers.

The eLink Adapter for Portal Infranet advertises multiple Portal Infranet business functions as eLink Platform services. These services are configurable in the adapter's configuration file. The services that the eLink Adapter for Portal Infranet offers may be called using the ATMI functions tpcall() or tpacall(). Both of these functions are request/response, but tpacall() is asynchronous while tpcall() is a synchronous invocation. The eLink Adapter for Portal Infranet advertises eLink Platform services for the following Portal Infranet business functions: