This section describes how to use the Apama Integration Adapter Framework (IAF). The IAF is a middleware-independent and protocol-neutral adapter tailoring framework designed to provide for the easy and straightforward creation of software adapters to interface Apama with middleware buses and other message sources. It provides facilities to generate adapters that can communicate with third-party messaging systems, extract and decode self-describing or schema-formatted messages, and flexibly transform them into Apama events. Vice-versa, Apama events can be transformed into the proprietary representations required by third-party messaging systems. It provides highly configurable and maintainable interfaces and semantic data transformations. An adapter generated with the IAF can be re-configured and upgraded at will, and in many cases, without having to restart it. Its dynamic plug-in loading mechanism allows a user to customize it to communicate with proprietary middleware buses and decode message formats.