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Making Connections – with the SEL Connector Platform

By Philip Leaper posted Thu July 02, 2020 10:38 AM

  
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A new platform for i2 Connect connectors.

Analyst’s Notebook is an incredibly versatile tool with different ways of obtaining data, the simplest usually being to import via the ANB importer, creating an import specification.  However, when dealing with 3rd party data, this involves a step before this, you need to export the data from the source system, which breaks you out of your workflow.  Another way of getting data from external systems is i2 Connect.

i2 Connect is a part of the i2 Analyze server that allows external data to be bought into i2 Analyst’s Notebook from external data sources, whether that be an API (REST / SOAP), a relational database, flat files or anything that can be accessed programmatically.  The i2 Connect service allows you to create a connector in any language and expose an API endpoint to the i2 Analyze configuration, as long as this endpoint conforms with the API specification, the connector will just work.  Because this implementation is so flexible (you can choose any language, any platform, any implementation pattern) it can often feel like a complex thing just to get started.

Enter the i2 SEL Connector Platform.  Security Expert Labs has created a platform for connector development that is designed to get new connector developers up and running quickly, make the process of connector development simpler and allow for scale as your solution grows.  Built on Loopback, a Node.JS platform, the SEL Connector Platform accepts connectors written in TypeScript / JavaScript provides a predefined framework for the construction of connectors, including:

 

Automatic generation of the connector configuration using annotations – define the configuration in a simple structure and let the system handle how this is exposed to the server:

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 Strongly Typed – We create strongly typed interfaces, so when you are writing your connector, you get code completion and syntax highlighting for your schema:

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Support for multiple schemas – The platform provides the ability to map a single connector to multiple schemas, so a single Connector Platform server can service multiple EIA systems with different schemas.  This also makes the process of deploying an existing connector to a new schema much simpler. 

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Docker support – modern solutions require modern platforms, as such we have designed the SEL Connector Platform to be deployable on Docker with a sample dockerfile and run script included for your convenience.

Samples and developer guides included – We know it can be hard to get started, so just take the sample connector and use that straight away, modify an example, or read the developer guide provided.

To obtain a copy of the SEL connector platform contact philip.leaper@ibm.com

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