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Using the Connector Development Kit: Create, Customize & Contribute your own Connectors — Part 1

By Owen Jeffs posted Wed March 22, 2023 10:35 AM

  
Authored by Owen Jeffs, @RAMKUMAR RAMALINGAM, and Priyadarshi Jena
To help our customers and partners remain competitive in their digital-first strategy, we have now allow them to build custom connectors and use them rapidly with App Connect Enterprise. A new Connector Development Kit (CDK) provides a low code development environment to simply creating connectors.

The rapid adoption of the digital-first strategy has led to the proliferation of applications across the organization both on- premises and on multiple clouds. Over 50% of organizations estimate, that they now have more than 100 applications in their portfolio, and are using a variety of cloud and SaaS applications to manage their day-to-day business operations. As the volume of applications continues to rise, connectivity and the need for connectors continues to grow. In many cases integrators need easy connectivity to on-premise applications and brand new cloud applications. Our new Connector Development Kit can support creating connectors for these use cases.

IBM Connector Development Kit is a UI-based development kit that allows you to create a connector in your browser without code. CDK provides an intuitive and guided user experience to build and test your connector. Once you completed your connector development, CDK allows you to download your connector as a private/custom connector OR allows you to publish your connector as a community connector for others to use.

IBM Automation Explorer is a platform built for community collaborations, where you can find community connectors that are published for you to download and use within IBM App Connect and other products.

Connector Development Lifecycle

The Connector Development Kit makes it easy for you to create a connector in less than a day. Let's now understand the different phases in the connector development process and the features available in CDK.

Discover

The first step of your connector development journey with CDK begins with a discovery phase.

  1. Identify the SaaS / on-prem application, for which you wish to build a connector. Ensure the target application has well- defined REST APIs with support for JSON payload.

  2. Create your IBM ID, if you don’t have one already. IBM ID is mandatory to create a custom connector and to download an existing community connector from IBM Automation Explorer.

  3. After you log in with your IBM ID, please review and accept the user terms to allow IBM to use your connector and logo within IBM App Connect.

Develop

Once you have completed the discovery phase, you can now proceed to develop the connector.

  1. CDK allows you to build a connector from scratch by describing the REST APIs OR you can import an Open API document to bootstrap your connector development.

  2. CDK supports multiple authentication types and based on the target application requirement you can configure the authentication type for your connector.

  3. Create actions by describing the REST APIs of the target application, and configure all the required properties such as server URL, API method, request schema, and response schemas.

  4. Test your actions by creating a connection to the target application.

After you have tested your connector actions successfully, you can now download the connector as .car (connector archive) file and use the connector as your custom / private connector within IBM App Connect.

Publish

Once you completed developing your connector and you wish to publish your connector as a community connector so that it's available for others to download and use.

  1. To publish your connector, click on publish and submit your connector for verification by IBM.

  2. The IBM team will verify and certify your connector, and might reach out to you for any clarification required OR with suggestions to improve your connector.

  3. Once the IBM team certifies your connector, the connector will be made available in the IBM Automation Explorer catalog for download.

Using CDK connector in IBM App Connect

IBM App Connect provides multiple approaches when it comes to invoking REST APIs of your target application.

  1. The HTTP node approach, allows you to invoke any REST APIs in your integration flow.

  2. The Open API approach, allows you to import any Open API document into your catalog and allows you to invoke the REST APIs described in your Open API.

However as described in the above table, both the HTTP node and Open API approach do not support many of the first-class experiences like parent dropdowns, auto token refresh, pagination support, etc., along with some of the smart features found in all built-in connectors in App Connect.

We recommend building connectors with IBM Connector Development Kit, to develop a first-class connector with smart features embedded within them. As we enhance CDK, we plan to embed more smart features in the connector built via CDK. Check out our video overview and get started today.

For discussions and resources around the IBM Connector Development Kit, please visit the Automation Explorer community group. 


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