Patent ID: 7865606

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving, at an exchange infrastructure implemented on one or more processors, data from a heterogeneous external data source implemented on one or more other machines, the data comprising a data format that is native to the heterogeneous external data source and not compliant with any of one or more extensible markup language protocols used by an integration server of the exchange infrastructure; instantiating, using an adapter engine implemented on the exchange infrastructure, an inbound adapter based on the data format used by the heterogeneous external data source, the adapter engine configured to dynamically instantiate and host a plurality of inbound and outbound adapter pairs, each of the plurality of inbound and outbound pairs being instantiated for an associated data format used by one of a plurality, of heterogeneous external data sources, each of the instantiated inbound and outbound adapter pairs adapted to be configured, created, started, stopped, and terminated; generating, at the inbound adapter, a message that conforms to at least one of the one or more extensible markup language protocols used by the integration server, the message comprising at least part of the data received at the exchange infrastructure; persisting, at the inbound adapter, a message identifier that identifies the message for re-sending of the message in case delivery of the message to the integration server fails; passing, through the inbound adapter, the message to the integration server; receiving, at the inbound adapter from the integration server, a confirmation acknowledgement confirming receipt of the message by the integration server; and processing, at the inbound adapter, the confirmation acknowledgment to prevent the message from being resent.