| webMethods Term | Definition |
| A2A | Acronym for application-to-application. Commonly used to refer to the integration of two or more applications within a single enterprise.
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| access control list (ACL) | A list of users that have been granted or denied access to a resource. Used to control access to services and folders.
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| activation | The Application Transaction Coordinator (ATC) defines a process for publishing data from one system and transmitting it to one more more target systems. A specific instance of this process is called an activation. An activation is tracked within the ATC database and can be managed using the Integration Monitor.
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| Active Software | Acquired by webMethods in 2001, Active Software produced what is now known as the webMethods Broker.
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| ActiveWeb | A former name of what is now the webMethods Broker. You may see references to "aweb" in API documentation.
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| ActiveWorks | A former name of what is now the webMethods Broker. You may see references to this and/or "aw" in documentation or code.
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| Adapter Configuration Tool | Now defunct tool to define and configure adapters for webMethods Enterprise Sever.
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| Adapter Errors | Tool to monitor webMethods Enterprise Server. Captures and displays adapter::error documents that are published.
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| adapter | Component that provides a way for a broker to interact with a resource of some kind, such as a database or API. For example, the ODBC Adapter for the webMethods Broker translates messages from the Broker to SQL statements for the database and vice versa. The Integration Server also uses adapters although they are often not referred to as such.
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| ADL | Acronym for ActiveWorks Definition Language. The file format for exporting and importing webMethods Enterprise Server configuration data, including document type definitions, infosets and more.
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| agent | A type of webMethods Enterprise Server adapter that, rather than connecting to a resource of some sort, such as a database, provides functionality on its own. Examples include the Integration Logic Agent, Rules Agent and Data Transformation Agent.
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| alias | A short-hand name for referring to a resource within webMethods Integration Server. Aliases can be used to refer to a database, another Integration Server, an Enterprise Server or some other type of resource. Services can then use this alias instead of a potentially lengthy or complex reference. For example, a service can refer "MyData" instead of the database hostname, port, etc. This also insulates services from changes to these references. The alias can be changed to reference another database and the service does not need to be modified.
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| application server | Originally a term used to describe a server hosting Java beans, it is now a general term for a category of servers that host objects and processing supporting one or more models such as Enterprise Java Beans, COM, etc.
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| asynchronous | A style of processing, typically used when describing communication. In synchronous processing, the initiating party waits for a response before moving on to other tasks. In asynchronous processing, the initiating process will initiate the process, such as starting a thread or sending a message, and will not wait for a response but instead will move on to other processing. When a response is desired/required, the response comes via another avenue to complete the interaction.
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| ATC | Acronym for Application Transaction Coordinator. Now defunct tool for webMethods Enterprise Server that provided guaranteed, once-only delivery and tracking of events/documents. The functions of this tool are now implicitly provided by other Enterprise Server components.
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