Application connector parallelism in enterprise application integration systems

1. A method for responding to requests with a connector, said method comprising steps of:

spawning, with the connector, at least one connector master process and a plurality of connector slave processes, each of the connector processes having a connection to an application;

receiving at the connector master process a request for processing from an integration broker requesting a service of an application that has a single-threaded or non-reentrant application programming interface;

determining that the request is of an event triggered type;

determining whether the connector slave process is available;

sending the request to at least one of the plurality of connector slave processes normally dedicated to that type of request, when the connector slave process is available; and

sending the event-triggered request to a process normally assigned to call-triggered requests when there are not any available connector slave connector processes assigned to event-triggered requests.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the sending step comprises sending the request to a slave process assigned to event-triggered requests, when the request is event-triggered.

3. An application integration system for responding to requests for processing, comprising a processor configured to:

spawn, with a connector, at least one connector master process and a plurality of connector slave processes, each of the connector processes having a connection to an application;

receive at the connector master process the request for processing made by an integration broker to an application that has a single threaded or non-reentrant application programming interface;

determine whether the request is of a call-triggered or event-triggered type;

sending the request to at least one of the plurality of connector slave processes normally dedicated to that type of request, when the at least one of the plurality of connector slave processes is available;

sending an event-triggered request to a process normally assigned to call-triggered requests when there are not any available connector slave processes assigned to event-triggered requests; and

sending a call-triggered request to a process normally assigned to event-triggered requests when there are not any available connector slave processes assigned to call-triggered requests.

4. The system of claim 3 , further comprising the connector for executing a connector master process.

5. A method for responding to requests with a connector, said method comprising steps of:

spawning, with the connector, at least one connector master process and a plurality of connector slave processes, each of the connector processes having a connection to an application;

receiving at the connector master process a request for processing from an integration broker requesting a service of an application that has a single-threaded or non-reentrant application programming interface;

determining that the request is of a call-triggered type;

determining whether the connector slave process is available;

sending the request to at least one of the plurality of connector slave processes assigned to call-triggered requests, when the connector slave process is available; and

sending the call-triggered request to a connector process normally assigned to event-triggered requests when there are not any available connector slave connector processes assigned to call-triggered requests.