Hi,

I am reviewing and presenting App Connect Designer internally in my company.

I can see that while being way easier to work with, designer is also more limited in functionality as compared to enterprise.

I am still a junior however, with limited experience using both softwares, so I have limited real-world experience in more complex integration use-cases.

Could people help me think of different use-cases that would be more difficult or even impossible using app connect designer?

Basically the purpose is to find the approximate line between whether using designer is beneficial, or using designer is more difficult or even impossible.

Thanks for sharing your ideas or use-cases

The theory is that Business People are able to work with the Designer without depending on IT people.

This may work for some simple cases during Tutorials.

Whenever you encounter issues, the Designer struggles in coming up with useful error messages.

If you have capacity / budget for a dedicated IT team, I would address Use Cases with App Connect Enterprise.

It really depends on what your use cases are.

In case you are interested in Automation, for the Designer you often depend on a physical device like a Mouse and a Web Browser. That makes automation more difficult.

If you want to store solutions in a git environment, the designer may also not be the first choice.

If you change your tools/apps rather frequently you may also prefer another tool

If your requirements are simple and a form of stable, the Designer might be able to handle it.

I never used the Designer in a production setup. With a premium subscript it may work better than in a trial setup.

Just to clarify we have two offerings discussed here: IBM App Connect Enterprise and IBM App Connect Enterprise aaS.

IBM App Connect Enterprise is our software offering that includes  just Toolkit, our Eclipse-based IDE.

IBM App Connect Enterprise aaS is our SaaS service that includes both Designer, our no-code authoring experience, and access to Toolkit. You cannot purchase Designer standalone.

This means that you have access to both authoring services if your purchase our SaaS offering and can switch between them however you would like. So, if there's a particular use case better resolved in Toolkit or Designer or vice versa you have the option to do either one without any additional charges. Best of both worlds!

Just a small point of extra clarification further to Annelise's excellent summary ... When she says that IBM App Connect Enterprise is our software offering that includes just Toolkit, it should be noted that our software offering license also provides for the deployment of flows into container architectures and this includes the ability to author and run Designer flows too ... so the great news is that you have the freedom to use both authoring options whether you're intending to deploy on software or SaaS. Regarding the initial question about what use-cases are not suited so well to App Connect Designer, these tend to be functions which are more in the integration specialist domain such as using Compute node ESQL, writing Java code as part of a message flow, or utilising our DFDL capability which lets you parse and serialise many bespoke tagged/delimited and fixed length industry data formats .. so if your integration use cases require non-JSON data formats then you will likely find better support in the Toolkit style of message flow. One other thought - I saw the recent enhancement request which you raised a couple of days ago, regarding Callable flows ... great to see that you've come across this area of functionality too, which is a nice way of being able to securely connect message flows between different physical servers and also securely tunnel data between on-premises and the public cloud. Callable flows also present a nice way to link Designer flows and Toolkit flows.