What are we building?
Before building an integration we should clearly understand what is it that we are building. There are two aspects to this question. Firstly, what is an integration, and secondly, how does Frends tackle building integrations.
So, what is an integration, generally speaking? Well, the most basic case that comes to mind is when you have two or more systems with data in them, and at some point the system owners will want to somehow use data from one system inside the other. For example, you might want to synchronize customer information from your online shop to your CRM system, so that you salespeople get the full view of the customers. In order to do this one would need to integrate the two systems, i.e. implement a mechanism that would periodically go to the online shop, take the necessary data and update the CRM system with new customers, update existing ones and potentially also delete ones that no longer exist. This seems to be an easy thing to achieve when you are talking about just two systems and seems somewhat straightforward to maintain (since in the simplest form this could be a scheduled Python or PowerShell script). However, as you add systems to the ecosystem and increase the amount of integrations and logic required to make things work, ad-hoc scripting can quickly get out of control. The need to support complex logic, data enrichment, working in hybrid environments, enforcing integration code versioning and maintaining adherence to best practices in implementation all contribute to the idea of looking for a better tool for the task, which in our case is Frends, which solves all of the abovementioned problems.
Integrations in Frends are the same as if you were coding an ad-hoc PowerShell script to transfer files from your shared network to an SFTP server. While the outcome can be the same (files get transferred from one place to another), Frends brings a vast amount of additional quality of life features to improve the process. Here are just some of those:
Automatic versioning (without the need to setup your own source core repositories)
Automatic monitoring and logging (without the need to enforce coding, or best practices for logging, or choosing a place for storing logs)
Ready-made connectors (without the need to find out how to make that call to, for example, MSSQL database properly)
Easy onboarding of new developers (as opposed to teaching PowerShell to developers)
Centralized UI for managing all of the integration
And so on, and so on...
Integrations in Frends are created in the browser UI and utilize the BPMN, or Business Process Model and Notation, which helps anyone, even without programming experience, to understand what is going on in the integration. In this course we will explore the key points essential in making an integration and how to utilize the full potential of Frends eiPaaS.
The next article is Example on Creating a new Process