CrossWorlds' mission is to package what many integration teams are busy doing, and put it in a box. The remaining 5 percent involves configuration and extension by the implementation team. Connectors provide a single interface point and are thus a gateway into a particular packaged application, with all the communication logic necessary to call its APIs. Approximately 80 percent of the code in connectors is written in Java. Collaborations, which are written completely in Java, contain the cross-application business logic generic enough to sit in between functional spaces.
Collaborations use connectors as agents to interact with specific packaged applications.
CrossWorlds currently delivers its server on Windows NT only, but Gupta is considering platform alternatives. The CrossWorlds runtime environment does not add a new user interface to the application infrastructure, but rather sits in the background and delivers integration services. CrossWorlds also provides a few Windows-specific tools to configure, monitor, and manage the environment, as well as tools to build custom collaborations and connectors for legacy applications. Since the runtime environment cannot guarantee the availability of all external applications, an asynchronous execution model is essential, says Gupta. Performance concerns Early on, CrossWorlds had significant concerns regarding server performance, but a little luck and a lot of work has delivered quite acceptable speed, the company says.