The IAF is a middleware-independent and protocol-neutral adapter tailoring framework. It is designed to allow 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. In the opposite direction, 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.

On the other hand, the SDKs provide lower-level client application programming interfaces that allow one to directly connect to Apama and transfer Apama Event Processing Language (EPL) code and events in and out. The SDKs provide none of the abstractions and functionality of the IAF, and hence their use is only recommended when a developer needs to write a highly customized and very high performance software client, or wishes to integrate existing client code with Apama in process.

The IAF is available on all platforms supported by Apama, although not all adapters will work on all platforms. For the most up-to-date information about supported platforms and compilers, see Software AG's Knowledge Center in Empower at https://empower.softwareag.com.