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Adapters facilitate a configurable integration among disparate business systems without worrying about underlying frameworks, tools, and technologies used in implementation of an individual business system.

The Oracle SOA Suite’s adapters are designed and developed using the J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA).

Oracle provides adapters to integrate various packaged applications, legacy applications, databases, middleware messaging systems, and web services.

BPEL processes may require working with multiple external resources.

The following are some of the common use cases for BPEL processes to connect to  as part of your application(s):

• An external filesystem for retrieving data or writing data either over  FTP or locally-mounted NFS

• A database for Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) data

• Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) for asynchronous or synchronous communication with point-to-point and/or publish-subscribe model

• An external application such as PeopleSoft

Adapters are used for connecting your BPEL process to other resources.

The major advantage is decoupling.

The resource may be local or may be residing remotely. Usually partner links depend on adapters for connecting to resources.

The Oracle SOA Suite’s BPEL JDeveloper IDE Component Palette provides out of the box adapters: AQ Adapter, BAM Adapter, Database Adapter, File Adapter, FTP Adapter, JMS Adapter, MQ Adapter, Socket Adapter, and Third Party Adapter.

These adapters’ services are usually defined within a BPEL process partner link.

JMS Adapter

The main purpose of JMS Adapter is to exchange messages between a Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) such as IBM MQ series, Progress SonicMQ or  Apache ActiveMQ, and BPEL services deployed in an SOA Suite platform.

Oracle has certified that the JMS Adapter works with AQ JMS (JMS provides OJMS 8.1.7, 9.0.1.4, and 9.2), WebLogic JMS, and third-party services such as TIBCO JMS, IBM WebSphere MQSeries (IBM MQSeries JMS 6.0), and Apache Active MQ.

The JMS Adapter supports three types of operations:

Consume Message,

Produce Message,

and Request/Reply.

The Consume Message operation polls for incoming messages from a JMS destination

while the Produce Message operation puts outgoing messages to a JMS destination.

The Request/Response operation  performs both Consume and Produce operations to JMS destinations either synchronously or asynchronously.

Web Service Adapter

Web Service Adapter assists us in creating a SOAP web service binding  component for message delivery.

Binding components such as web services make service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications accessible to the outside world.

The Web Service Adapter provides two types of service bindings: Reference and Service.