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Openadaptor is an open source Java toolkit that may be classified as a lightweight Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solution. The toolkit provides a framework and components for building links between systems and various middleware solutions.

The toolkit provides software components for connecting to a variety of interfaces (e.g. JMS, Tibco, RDBMS, SOAP, HTTP, SMTP, Files) and for working with different data representations (e.g. XML, JDBC result sets, fixed width and delimited string records).

The framework does not require any infrastructure other than the Java Runtime Environment and can be used to run adaptors as standalone processes, embedded in other software or deployed within application containers.

Writing custom components does not require extensive knowledge of the framework. All Openadaptor components are Java Beans and can be used with the Spring framework. This means that adaptor processes can be developed by writing an XML configuration file rather than having to write and compile Java code. In this way the components can be combined by a developer to deliver an adaptor extremely quickly.

The fundamental components

Components that can be used to make up a single adaptor are:
Read Connector. These connect to an external resource and receive / poll data.
Processor. These operate on data, either by transforming it in some way or discarding it.
Write Connector. These connect to an external resource and send / publish data.

Every adaptor will have one or more read connectors, zero or more processors and one or more write connectors typically chained together in a pipeline. For simple adaptors a developer only needs to deal with Connectors and Processors and specify how they are chained together.
Additional components are Pipeline that “knows” how the components are chained together and Router that allows more sophisticated routing and exception management.

In conclusion

Openadaptor allows rapid business system integration with little or no custom programming. Its modular nature, with clear and concise set of components, and its rich set of documentation and examples make writing the first adaptors painless.

Even if it cannot be considered an identity provisioning product, it can be useful to rapidly script programs able to extract identity data from one of the supported systems, process them through processors and then put the resulting data to another system.

Tags: architectures, connectors, identity provisioning, identity synchronization, openadaptor

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Identity & Access Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.