An active adapter with edge cache approach for order status information integration

Sharing information among multiple business operations and distributed locations in an integrated manner has always been one of the central issues in business activity and process management. The effectiveness of the entire commerce value chain for an enterprise is largely dependent on the satisfaction of the information requesters. Improving upon the typical data federation approach, we propose to add data caches in the adapters that connect directly to the information requesters for fast data retrieval. To demonstrate the proposed approach, we have implemented the new active features for the IBM Websphere Business Integration middleware. Experimental results show that the active adapter approach significantly reduces the average data access time under a real order status tracking system.