A resource adapter is specific to the Enterprise Information System (EIS) for which it was developed. It provides the system-level operations needed to communicate and operate with the EIS. A resource adapter which supports the JCA interfaces can be used with any application server which also supports these interfaces. The resource adapter reveals its capabilities to the application server through a JCA-defined API. Using the defined API, the application server can effectively incorporate the services of the resource adapter into its operations while isolating the applications themselves from the underlying implementation of the EIS. Important requirements for effective and scalable integration with EIS systems are services such as:
connection management and pooling.
transaction management to support global transactions, i.e. transactions which involve both the application server and EIS.
logging and tracing.
and a security framework enabling both container-managed and bean-managed sign-on.
Application servers implementing the Java EE 6 specification, provide standardized APIs of the Java EE Connector Architecture 1.6 in accordance with the JSR322 specification. As a result, it is a simple task to deploy the BeanConnect JCA 1.6 resource adapter in an application server.
Figure 1: Java EE Connection Architecture - embedding in application server
The application components and the resource adapter are deployed using deployment descriptors which make it possible to integrate the resource adapter and the application components in the application server:
Standard deployment descriptor
ejb-jar.xmlfor application component in accordance with the Java EE specification.Standard deployment descriptor
ra.xmlfor the resource adapter.Optional an application server-specific configuration file or a deployment descriptors for the resource adapter and for the application component.
For a detailed description of these deployment descriptors, see Configuration files in the application server.