Overview

The e-Adapter Development Kit (e-ADK) provides developers tools to minimize development and maintenance efforts. The e-ADK contains two components: a specialized C++ software development kit used to build adapters (SDK) and the adapter runtime environment (ARE).

This book is designed as a reference for developers using the e-ADK Developer's Guide. Detailed information for developing an adapter is available in the e-ADK Developer's Guide. This section provides an overview of the e-ADK tool and architecture.

e-ADK Tool

The e-ADK has two parts: the Adapter Shell and an adapter plug-in. The Adapter Shell makes calls to an adapter plug-in. The adapter plug-in, which interacts with an application or data source and targets, is built by the developer using the APIs provided with the e-ADK.

Adapter Shell

The Adapter Shell provides a consistent processing flow for all adapters, for example, similar command lines, configuration, and processing.

The Adapter Shell performs general initialization and setup before calling a mode function and then cleans up before shutdown. The general steps for the Adapter Shell are:

Initialize the Adapter Shell.
- Determine the mode and the datatype.
  The modes are Acquire, Deliver, Process, Schema, Schema Remove, and Catalog.
  The datatypes are NDO and buffer.
- Initialize input or output transports and open the transports for acquire, deliver, and process modes.
- In schema mode, build a repository.
Call initAdapter() with the configuration information.
Execute the mode in a loop with the plug-in function called and the transport or schema functionality performed.
Call shutdownAdapter().

Adapter Plug-In

The adapter plug-in, which is created by an adapter developer, is responsible for processing and providing the necessary data. The adapter plug-in performs the interaction with an application or data sources and targets. The Adapter Shell loads the adapter plug-in at initialization.

e-ADK Architecture

The e-ADK comprises the following, which are explained in detail in separate chapters:

Adapter Developer Class Library
Documentation for Class Library
Examples of code

Adapters use the following modes to transfer information:

Summary of Adapter Modes
Mode Name	Description as Used in e-ADK
Schema	Used to create formats for storing data structure definitions in a repository.
Schema Remove	Used to remove formats from a repository.
Acquire	Used to get data from the applications or data sources and put data to a transport.
Deliver	Used to get data from a transport and put that data to the application.
Process	Used to get data from a transport, enrich the data, and put the result to a transport.
Catalog	Provides a list of schema names returned from an adapter.


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