Integration projects are continual processes that must adjust to repeated changes in business and technical requirements. Integration is therefore always a process and never a one-off event. Each of the elements within the integration environment has its own rate of change, its own development and maintenance schedules, and its own technology adoption cycle. In some cases there is even an element of the seasonal changes in fashion!

Your integration solution must thrive in an environment that is constantly changing. SCORE Adaptive Bridges is specifically designed for such a changing environment, giving you integrated processes, supported by an extensive collection of intelligent tools, to discover and adapt to changes whenever, and wherever, they occur.

You cannot know what you will need to integrate with next, but it is sure it will be different to what you have done before. To prepare for the unknown and unexpected demands an adaptive solution. That is why we talk about SCORE Adaptive Bridges delivering “Integration in Motion™”.

You start with Discovery and then move on to Composition and Production. The real world then intervenes, changes occur and you then “rotate” back to the Discovery and start to make changes to your existing composition model and adaptive services.

SCORE Adaptive Bridges, Composition Manager, the Composition Repository and SCOUT² Development Platform give you the tools, techniques and processes to work effectively in a world of constant change.

Here is an overview of just some of the ways that SCORE Adaptive Bridges helps you to work in an environment that is in a constant state of change:

• Version Tracking – The composition repository has an extended implementation of the OMG MOF standard that adds version management down to the element level. This allows SCORE Adaptive Bridges to keep track of every change to an element in the composition model.
• Dependency Analysis – A key aspect of SCORE Adaptive Bridges is that many existing objects are reused, ranging from legacy interface specifications to WSDL specifications for Web services. The composition repository keeps track of where everything originally came from, and so can detect when the original source specification has changed.
• Grants – When a specification has been discovered from an external source the question arises on how local changes should be handled. SCORE Adaptive Bridges provides a “grants” concept that allows authorized users to make local changes to discovered objects. The composition repository keeps track of who can change what and this is reflected in the dependency analysis and cross-reference information maintained by the repository.
• Multiple Interfaces – When an adaptive service is already deployed it is likely that at some point in the future it will need to be changed. SCORE Adaptive Bridges freezes external interfaces so that deployed applications do not break. If a change needs to be made then a new version of the interface is created. The generated code is able to support multiple versions of the interface in parallel. This is useful, for example, where a large deployed base of client systems need to be migrated to a new version but cannot be done all at once. In this case the application adapter is regenerated with support for both the old and new interfaces. The new adaptive proxies can then be deployed to the client machines in a controlled manner.
• Reporting and Analysis – SCORE Adaptive Bridges offers a wide range of standard reports to understand what is used where and the overall dependencies between objects. Reports are implemented using standard XSLT style sheets that are easily updated or replaced to meet your specific reporting needs. If the standard reports do not need your needs, you can directly access the XML document that stores the composition repository with any third-party report tool that can process XML documents.

Where to Go Next?

Now that you have read about the three key processes – Discovery, Composition and Production – of SCORE Adaptive Bridges, we recommend that you now move on to the Runtime View to learn about the architecture of the client, server and middleware code generated by SCORE Adaptive Bridges to implement adaptive services on diverse deployment platforms.