The connectors used by ICS are actually built using a framework known as Cloud Adapters Software Development Kit (sometimes shortened to Adapter SDK). The SDK is freely available as a download so that anyone can use it to build their own adapters. This means it is very much possible to have customer adapters created for your own applications to simplify connectivity - as Oracle has done with Salesforce, for example (hiding the handshake process when connecting to Salesforce). It can be used to overcome integrations that have interfaces that are not realized through standards such as web services; for example, when integration is only offered through the use of a set of libraries.

As using the SDK is very much a Java development activity, we are only going to look at what is involved, rather than going through the process in detail, as it would warrant several chapters in its own right. We will walk through what is involved and how the different elements...