A connector helps IBM® Integration Bus to interact with external applications or data sources.
Companies often build their own internal applications to which they want to connect. You can connect through web services, or access data directly from a database to connect to applications. However, you can also use the connector framework to develop a connector for a specific application or technology. You can use the connector framework to build reusable connectors that are not already available, reducing the need to build these interactions manually every time you need them. A connector can encapsulate complex interactions that you would otherwise achieve by using multiple message flow nodes.
Input connectors listen for external events or receive data from external sources. These connectors constitute the starting point of a message flow. Polling for input is a special case of an input connector that is supported in the connector framework.
Output connectors send data or publish events to external systems without expecting to receive a response.
Like output connectors, request connectors send data, but expect to receive a response in return.
Connectors constitute the runtime part of connecting to external systems or applications. You deploy connectors by installing the connector runtime files on an integration node (see Installing a connector in IBM Integration Bus).
During initialization, connectors get services, such as logging and security, from IBM Integration Bus. A standard Java logger is provided to all connectors to allow the connector to use the logging and trace framework of IBM Integration Bus.
To use connectors in IBM Integration Bus, you must also create a user-defined node to expose the capabilities of the connector to a message flow.