Agent or integration servers

Integration Servers are Java-based processes running in the background to process various tasks. Integration servers allow Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation to collaborate with different systems, organizations, and businesses—through a standard, uniform interface to all systems.You configure Integration Servers, and their tasks, with the Service Definition Framework.

The integration servers that process information from external systems can get work from message queues, database tables, and files. Integration servers that send work to external systems do so through a variety of transport mechanisms such as message queues, email, database tables, files, etc.

An agent server is a specialized sub-class of the integration server that runs the Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundationdefined “time-triggered” transactions. These include transactions to schedule orders. In the transaction configuration screen, you can designate transactions to an agent server. Multiple transactions could be assigned to an agent server. You can also specify that a transaction should run in multiple threads.

For example, if you associate both the Schedule and Release Order transactions to an agent server (sched_rel_ord_agent) with 3 threads each, when you start an instance of the sched_rel_ord_agent agent server, that server will have six processing threads – three for the Schedule Order transaction and three for the Release Order transaction.

You can also start multiple agent server instances. For example, if you start four sched_rel_ord_agent servers, you will see four Java™ processes running in the system. Each Java process has 3 threads of the Schedule Order and Release Order transactions. In total, you get 12 threads of the Schedule Order and 12 threads of the Release Order transaction.

The agent server relies on the JNDI service. At startup, it registers itself to the JNDI. This allows other servers to locate it.