How intelligent are the adapters in your enterprise integration product? Should you care? An increasing number of vendors—convinced that their customers need more flexible, more "intelligent" application connectors—are touting their "intelligent adapter" technology as a key tool for making EAI projects easier to implement and less burdensome to update and manage.

What, exactly, are intelligent adapters? For starters, they're adapters that are designed to handle many of the dynamic tasks required in application integration—tasks usually handled either in the integration broker or done by hand by a programmer, such as updating the adapter code when the enterprise application is upgraded.

Ross Altman, a research director for the Gartner Group, says intelligent adapters have become increasingly important for most types of integration projects. "You need intelligent adapters for almost every type of integration except the simplest," he says. "If all you need to do is move a message from one file to another, then you're not that concerned with what the adapter can and can't do. But the more points of connectivity you have to maintain, the more messages you have to move and transform, the more elaborate the process and the more frequent the changes to the environment, then the more you'll want to use intelligent adapter technology." Altman believes that adapter technology is the area where vendors will differentiate themselves for the next several years.

Standard "static" adapter technology simply links one application to another, or to an integration broker, in a dumb, point-to-point connection. The main benefit of a static adapter is that the programmer doesn't have to work with all the different application program interfaces, since the adapter handles the basic translation behind the scenes. But that's about all such adapters do. They can't transform incompatible data between disparate applications or update themselves when changes occur in the applications.

That's where intelligent adapters come into play.

How Smart Adapters Work

Saga Software, for example, includes intelligent agent adapters in the company's Sagavista integration product. Saga's adapters are a combination of agent containers and adapter components. The adapter components consist of the actual code for communicating with the enterprise application. The agent container handles services such as session management, error handling and exception management.