Programming Tutorials

J2EE Connector Architecture

By: aathishankaran in Java Tutorials on 2007-02-20  

The Connector architecture is a J2EE SPI that allows resource adapters that support access to Enterprise Information Systems to be plugged in to any J2EE product. The Connector architecture defines a standard set of system-level contracts between a J2EE server and a resource adapter. The standard contracts include:

A connection management contract that lets a J2EE server pool connections to an underlying EIS, and lets application components connect to an EIS. This leads to a scalable application environment that can support a large number of clients requiring access to EIS systems.

A transaction management contract between the transaction manager and an EIS that supports transactional access to EIS resource managers. This contract lets a J2EE server use a transaction manager to manage transactions across multiple resource managers. This contract also supports transactions that are managed internal to an EIS resource manager without the necessity of involving an external transaction manager.

A security contract that enables secure access to an EIS. This contract provides support for a secure application environment, which reduces security threats to the EIS and protects valuable information resources managed by the EIS.

A thread management contract that allows a resource adapter to delegate work to other threads and allows the application server to manage a pool of threads. The resource adapter can control the security context and transaction context used by the worker thread.

A contract that allows a resource adapter to deliver messages to message driven beans independent of the specific messaging style, messaging semantics, and messaging infrastructure used to deliver messages. This contract also serves as the standard message provider pluggability contract that allows a message provider to be plugged into any J2EE server via a resource adapter.

A contract that allows a resource adapter to propagate an imported transaction context to the J2EE server such that its interactions with the server and any application components are part of the imported transaction. This contract preserves the ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) properties of the imported transaction.

An optional contract providing a generic command interface between an application program and a resource adapter.