Production Basics
An interoperability production is an integration framework for easily connecting systems and for developing applications for interoperability. A production provides built-in connections to a wide variety of message formats and communications protocols. You can easily add other formats and protocols – and define business logic and message transformations either by coding or using graphic interfaces. Productions provide persistent storage of messages, which allow you to trace the path of a message and audit whether a message is successfully delivered. The elements in a production are known as business hosts. There are three kinds of business hosts, with different purposes as follows:
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Business services connect with external systems and receive messages from them. Business services relay the messages to other business hosts in the production.
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Business processes allow you to define business logic, including routing and message transformation. Business processes receive messages from other business hosts in the production and either process the requests or forward them to other business hosts.
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Business operations connect with external systems and send the messages to them. Business operations receive messages from other business hosts in the production and typically send them to external systems.
The following figure provides a conceptual overview of a production and business hosts.
Business hosts communicate with each other via messages. All messages are stored in the InterSystems IRIS® database and can be seen via the Management Portal.
In most cases (but not all), a business service has an associated inbound adapter. The role of an inbound adapter is to accept input from entities external to the production. Similarly, a business operation usually has an associated outbound adapter. The role of an outbound adapter is to send output to entities external to the production. InterSystems IRIS provides a large set of adapters to handle different technologies. For example, you use a different adapter for files than you do for FTP. It is also possible to define your own adapters.
The following figure shows an actual production, as seen in the Management Portal:
This view shows all the connections to and from one business host, Demo.Loan.FindRateDecisionProcessBPL. Note that this view does not display adapters because these are incorporated into the business service and business operation definitions.
