What is diffrence between loose API and Strong APIs in Teamcenter SOA programming?

Question

Teamcenter provides 2 OOTB API sets, loose and strong. what is the difference between these two? When should we use loose API and when strong ones?

Answer 1

We actually have 3. Loose, Strong and RAC. RAC is explicitly for rich client customization. So if you are to call an SOA that you have authored in BMIDE in the rich client java code, you would do so by adding the RAC jars as dependency. In addition to that, you could have another application or a client that can talk to Teamcenter but may not be as dependent. Depending on that, you would choose either Loose or Strong jars. Loose and Strong represent the extent to which your custom application depends on Teamcenter.

In Teamcenter, you have different types of objects right - Dataset, Item, ItemRevision etc. With Strong jars, you would have corresponding Java classes Dataset, Item, ItemRevision etc and the attributes that are defined on the BOs in BMIDE are available in the form of getter/setters on the corresponding classes in Java like ItemRevision.get_date_released().

With Loose jars however, you would have a single class called ModelObject and any type of BO instance in code is represented by the class ModelObject and a query for property could be done via a get API like ModelObject.getPropertyObject("date_released");

So as you are seeing, Strong jars introduce tight coupling compared to Loose jars and which one to use depends on your usecase.