Why JCA? What's the benefit and cost?

Benefit:
- An application component provider can focus on the development of business and presentation logic for application components and need not get involved in the system-level issues related to EIS integration

- It leads to an easier and faster cycle for the development of scalable, secure, and transactional enterprise applications that require connectivity with multiple EISes.

- The connector architecture reduces the integration effort from an (m * n) problem to an (m + n) problem, where ‘m’ is the number of application servers and ‘n’ the number of EISs to be integrated

- Provides a common programming interface model for interacting with EIS via resource adapters

- standard. Can be deployed to multiple J2EE servers

- better tool support

- easy for the lifecycle management.


- Connection & transaction management and security

Ref:
Oracle® Fusion Middleware Programming Resource Adapters for Oracle WebLogic Server
11g Release 1 (10.3.1)
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E15523_01/web.1111/e13732/toc.htm