nTegrator Application Development

The creation of a nTegrator application designed to accomplish certain objectives mimics the creation of a business unit of people  that are charged with achieving those same objectives.

In this hypothetical "people" organization, there are three fundamental job descriptions:

• Managers - These people are given the responsibility to achieve all or part of the objectives of the business unit. They have other people reporting to them, either managers or employees.

• Employees - These people have the responsibility of carrying out a specific task related to the achievement of the objective of the manager to whom they report.

• Assistant - These people can assist managers or employees in any way that is necessary, usually by offloading routine tasks from the manager or employee with whom they work.

Just as the organization chart is composed of combinations of 3 components, so is an nTegrator application. The nTegrator components are:

• Collections (similar to managers) - A collection can contain either collections and/or Data Transports.

• Data Transports (similar to employees) - A Data Transport is a source or sink of data. It converts external data to XML and internal XML to external data formats.

• Agents (similar to assistants) - Any number of agents can be associated with a collection or a Data Transport. An agent can be used to transform data, to merge data, to monitor data transmissions ,or to control data flow.

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