IFS Connect is an integration broker, designed for XML and web services. It can be used to facilitate integration of business logic with external business processes, applications, and devices.
The openness and flexibility of IFS Connect is achieved through the concept of transport connectors. Transport Connectors provide the connectivity between external devices/applications and IFS Connect. They provide protocol and data format conversion between IFS Applications internal XML format and external formats. For example, the Mail connector translates to MIME format and SMTP protocol. The connectors are hosted by a framework that provides services such as SOAP enveloping and XML transformation.
IFS Connect includes a number of ready-to-use connectors as well as a development framework to build your own. IFS Connect is based on Internet communication standards and include connectors such as Mail (POP3/IMAP/SMTP), HTTP/HTTPS, FTP/FTPS/SFTP and JMS.
Using transformers, IFS Connect
can transform both outbound and inbound messages between XML and some other
file format, for example HTML or plain text.
IFS Connect enables everything to talk to everyone. The Business API (BizApi)
doesn't need to
be aware of which connector is receiving the message. It's just a matter of configuring
the routing rules. It is also possible to define a PL/SQL method instead of
BizAPI.