SCORE Adaptive Bridges provides you a flexible service-based integration architecture with Adaptive Services. Adaptive services are not middleware or communications protocols – they are an abstract platform-independent model of what needs to be done.

Adaptive services are a model-centric approach to integration rather than the more common code-centric approach. By investing in an architectural solution to the integration problem you avoid creating complex one-off “spaghetti” integration solutions that are only guaranteed to make your life more complicated in the future!

Preparing for the unexpected demands a flexible solution. You do not know what is coming next, but you know for sure that are and will continue to be new demands for integrating with your legacy applications and data stores.

There are a wide range of external stakeholders whose requirements drive the need for integration with existing applications and data stores. Adaptive Services are an approach to integration that gives you the flexibility, performance and adaptivity that you need to integrate what you have already built with what you will build in the future.

We are still talking about the requirements that an integration solution needs to support. The technical view of how it is actually implemented is explained in the Methodology View and Runtime View. For the moment let us consider the requirements for adaptive services – what they need to do for you.

Interface Intelligence

Adaptive services must act intelligently on behalf of both the legacy application provider and the service consumer. Adaptive services manage all the technical details of the connection, allowing the service developer to focus on the business requirements. Interface intelligence includes:

• User sessions
• Database transactions
• Mapping data types
• Object-relational mapping
• Business logic for complex requirements
• Layering of interfaces and external services
• Creation of composite applications
• Vertical composition of services
• Encapsulation of middleware technologies
• Transparent optimization

and much more.

Service Agility

Adaptive services must thrive in a changing world, intelligently absorbing change on behalf of legacy application providers and service consumers. Service agility is only truly effective when it is at the heart of the integration architecture – it is not something that can be added as an afterthought. Service agility includes:

• Continuous consistency checking
• Detailed impact analysis
• Recognition of interface changes
• Intelligently incorporating model changes
• Automatically creating new interface versions
• Runtime support of multiple interface versions
• Deployment to multiple platforms
• Concurrent platform support

and much more.

Service Quality

Adaptive services must meet the high levels of quality required with mission critical applications and data stores. Integration projects must not endanger the integrity, availability or reliability of your legacy application portfolio. Service quality includes:

• Non-invasive legacy integration
• Managed access to data stores
• Integration with host security models
• High performance
• High availability
• Low latency
• Ease of system management
• Integration with performance tools
• Integration with accounting tools
• Dedication to open standards
• Ease of installation
• Ease of training

and much more.

Where to Go Next?

Now that you have read about creating a service-based integration architecture with adaptive services, we recommend that you now move on to the Methodology View to learn about how SCORE Adaptive Bridges implements the OMG Model Driven Architecture (MDA) to build adaptive services.