Integration

Welcome to IBM App Connect Enterprise! If you're entirely new to ACE, it's really easy to get up and running and try out the software. First time users can download the ACE Evaluation Edition entirely free of charge (like many IBM websites, to get access you will need to register for an IBMid first, but that process is really fast and again doesn't cost you anything). ACE 13.0.1.0 Evaluation Edition isn't time limited so you can take your time trying out the product. ACE Evaluation Edition carries all the functions of the paid editions, but the flows you create are rate-limited so they won't process messages any faster than one message per second.

For those who are familiar with the product through its previous versions, you'll notice that we've simplified some of the names of the paid editions too. Once you have purchased entitlement and downloaded the single installation package from the IBM Passport Advantage website, you can use our unzip-and-go installation method on Linux platforms and for Windows we have an updated graphical installer that deals with license acceptance and offers a small number of further options.

Once the product is installed, you should run the ibmint set mode command. Several modes/editions are available. The table below shows all the details, but there shouldn't be too many surprises here - whilst some of the names have been changed slightly compared to ACE 12, the purpose of each edition and its operational restrictions remain the same. You should set an installation to have its mode/edition match the kind of environment it will be used for - ie Development, Non-Production, Production-Advanced or Production-Standard.

The App Connect Enterprise product has traditionally focussed on the requirements of Integration Specialists who create message flows in the Eclipse-based ACE Toolkit authoring tool. The ACE Toolkit continues to be strategic for us and in future releases it will continue to be enhanced and improved (more details below) and is updated in ACE 13 to run on Eclipse 4.31, launched using Java 17. ACE 13 also provides a new alternative tool for flow authoring (named App Connect Enterprise Designer) which is suitable for all users and aims to be especially accessible to those without coding experience. The Designer first appeared as part of our managed cloud iPaaS, and has subsequently also been provided in App Connect Enterprise container environments, but this is the first time the tool has been provided for local installation directly on a laptop or in a VM without the need for containers.

The Designer tool is powered by JSON schema. Designer connects to application endpoint systems (most commonly SaaS applications on the public web) and discovers the structured metadata required to communicate with them. These structures are easy for users to navigate graphically making it very straight forward to create integration flows that can transform and map data as it passes from one application to the next. The Designer's development experience makes it easy to refer back to data structures generated by nodes earlier in the flow. The Designer's data mapping feature (powered by the open source JSONata mapping language) provides a graphical way of defining transformations which can be more familiar for business users as it follows a “spreadsheet style” based around the target data structure, as opposed to dragging and dropping fields between a source and target.

Designer flows mainly use JSON data structures but the tool also provides rudimentary support for XML and CSV formats. For more advanced message modelling requirements, the Toolkit remains the best development choice. The message flows which are generated from both Designer and Toolkit can be deployed to run inside the same ACE Integration Server runtime processes that have been part of our product architecture for many many years. In future, we also expect to provide features to enable users to easily transition Designer authored flows into Toolkit flows making it really easy to start simple but then transition to a more specialist tool should you find a need to later.

From ACE 13.0.1.0 the Toolkit palette has been expanded to include 15 new Discovery Input Message Flow nodes:

• Businessmap Input node: Use the Businessmap Input node to monitor and accept input from Businessmap.
• ClickSend Input node: Use the ClickSend Input node to monitor and accept input from ClickSend.
• Eventbrite Input node: Use the Eventbrite Input node to monitor and accept input from Eventbrite.
• Front Input node: Use the Front Input node to monitor and accept input from Front.
• Greenhouse Input node: Use the Greenhouse Input node to monitor and accept input from Greenhouse.
• IBM Maximo Input node: Use the IBM Maximo Input node to monitor and accept input from  IBM Maximo.
• IBM Targetprocess Input node: Use the IBM Targetprocess Input node to monitor and accept input from Targetprocess.
• Magento Input node: Use the Magento Input node to monitor and accept input from Magento.
• Marketo Input node: Use the Marketo Input node to monitor and accept input from Marketo.
• Slack Input node: Use the Slack Input node tomonitor and accept input from Slack.
• Toggl Track Input node: Use the Toggl Track Input node to monitor and accept input from Toggl Track. 
• Wrike Input node: Use the Wrike Input node to monitor and accept input from Wrike.
• Zoho Books Input node: Use the Zoho Books Input node to monitor and accept input from Zoho Books.
• Zoho CRM Input node: Use the Zoho CRM Input node to monitor and accept input from Zoho CRM.
• Zoho Recruit Input node: Use the Zoho Recruit Input node to monitor and accept input from Zoho Recruit.

The ACE Toolkit now has a new JSONata Mapping node which provides a new alternative way of transforming messages in the middle of a flow.

JSONata is a lightweight query and transformation language specifically designed for interacting with JSON data. It has built in-operators and functions for manipulating and combining data. You can apply JSONata mapping to fields in the message that is being built. 

The Toolkit has a new enhancement in ACE 13, allowing you to create an external directory vault or connect to an existing one with menu options for you to create, update and delete credentials. This makes localised testing of flows that interact with third party applications much easier as you no longer have to leave the Toolkit experience.

Credentials are displayed with icons to represent the type of application they are used to connect to. For each kind of application, the required properties that are needed for each available method of authentication are displayed using a series of handy enumerated drop-down menus.

By default the ACE 13.0.1.0 runtime uses IBM Semeru Java 17 as its default JRE version. To be very precise about things, ACE 13 actually ships with IBM Semeru Runtime Certified Edition 17.0.12.0 This means that no matter whether you're creating an independent integration server for development purposes from the Toolkit, or using the command console to create an integration node owned server using the ibmint create command, by default all servers will use Java 17 when they start. The ACE installation also still includes Java 1.8 (or very precisely, java version 1.8.0_421 build 8.0.8.30) as well, so users can separately select their chosen Java version for each integration server. You can do this using the ibmint specify jre command.

Not all features of ACE are supported with each Java version. If you are intending to use the Change DataCapture message flow node then this requires Java 17. There are also a handful of long-standing ACE functions which are not yet compatible with Java 17 and should you wish to use them you will need to still use Java 1.8. This is the situation with WS-Security, WS-Trust, TFIM integration, and message flows that use either the Global Cache or CORBA nodes. In terms of actually writing Java code yourself to be executed within a message flow under a Java Compute node, we still support the building of your ACE JCN projects with either Java 1.8 or Java 17. One final point worthy of mention is that whilst Java 1.8 is also included with ACE 13, we are expecting to pre-announce its removal from support before the end of the support cycle of ACE 13 - so watch this space if you are intending to stick with Java 1.8 for now.

As existing users will be very aware, IBM App Connect Enterprise has always taken the topic of migration as a high priority. We want to protect your existing investments in our platform and enable you to bring forward your resources from previous releases of the product in a process that we're keen to make as frictionless as possible. ACE 12 and ACE 13 are architecturally very, very similar. Both major versions have integration nodes and servers which are structured the same way, and the storage formats used on disk are the same This means that migrating between ACE versions is becoming easier with each release and is very much simpler than going from IIB to ACE. In this latest release we have modernized the mqsiextractcomponents command, replacing it with a new command but with similar options in the ibmint command family. Here's a quick example:

ibmint extract node --backup-file C:\temp\MigrationDemo\MyNode_240927_150001.zip --input-integration-node MyNode --output-integration-node MyNodeMigrated

We'll be publishing a full blog on the detailed topic of migration to the IBM Community soon, so watch this space!

And Finally ...