Java™ Connector Architecture: Building Custom Connectors and Adapters

History and Evolution of Adapters

Unlike most software innovations, adapter technology was born in the corporate IT shops. The need to connect two business applications has existed for a long time, and generally was driven by the requirement to exchange data between applications on different platforms (operating systems). The typical solution to this problem involved downloading data from an application database and uploading it to another application's database. As the number of applications grew, the relatively straightforward task of moving data between two applications became much more complex. Differences in the data models, architecture, and executing environments (platforms, databases, and so on) added to the complexity.

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