App Connect

 View Only

Introducing IBM Connector Development Kit: Create, Customize & Contribute your own Connectors — Part 1

By Owen Jeffs posted Fri March 24, 2023 12:14 PM

  
Authored by @RAMKUMAR RAMALINGAM, Priyadarshi Jena & Owen Jeffs

IBM App Connect is an integration solution powered by Automation and AI technology allowing businesses to easily and rapidly connect people, processes, and data across hybrid environments.

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 across the ecosystem has become critical to ensure businesses remain competitive, as well as respond and adapt to market changes quickly.

In the world of integration, connectors play a key role in integrating applications, building APIs, and acting on events. Today IBM App Connect offers over 100+ connectors to a wide variety of SaaS applications. No matter how extensive our list of pre-built connectors becomes, there’s always one or two that are missing such as legacy data sources, or niche SaaS applications that you plan to integrate with.

To help our customers and partners remain competitive in their digital-first strategy, we have now launched IBM Automation Explorer and IBM CDK (Connector Development Kit), which allow the building of custom connectors rapidly on their own.

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.

0 comments
86 views

Permalink