Effective Application Development in IBM Integration Bus Andrew Coleman Architect, IBM Integration Bus on Cloud Chair, W3C XML Query Working Group

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Effective Application Development

• What should you consider when building connectivity solutions? – What technology is provided to help you? – What design techniques should you know about? – What should you try to avoid?

•  Main points – Design with IIB features – Design for performance and scalability – Design for administration – Design with interfaces – Design consistently

•  Test

1. Design with IIB facilities

Tools of the Trade!

• Built-in nodes encapsulate transports, technologies and applications – Our intent is always to make the common tasks easy, and the rest possible! – Use the built-in nodes to reduce the amount of custom code required – Makes best use of built-in facilities like activity trace and resource statistics

Create Your Connectivity Solution

•  Integration Bus can interact with a huge range of environments •  Transports and protocols

– MQ / SOAP / HTTP / TCPIP / JMS •  Data repositories

– File / Database / IMS

•  Applications – SAP / Siebel / PeopleSoft / JDEdwards – CICS / IMS –  .Net

•  APIs – SCA – CORBA

•  All input nodes can be configured to work with any message format.

Getting data in and out of IIB

•  WMB and Integration Bus have several transformation options: – Mapping – XSLT – ESQL – Java – .NET

•  Reflects the importance of transformation in connectivity solutions – User-defined nodes supported for Java and C/C++

•  Every transformation option has strengths and weaknesses! – Performance and scalability – Backend integration – Skill sets and learning curve – Developer usability – Portability and maintenance

•  Use a transformation technology appropriate to the problem at hand!

Transformation Options

Subflows

•  Subflows are simply message flows that are invoked from another flow –  Input and output nodes in the subflow become terminals in the main flow – Use subflows to break up large problems into smaller more manageable chunks

•  Subflows are directly deployable to the runtime – Shared subflows deployed just once per execution group (or application) – No need to redeploy message flows after changes to shared routines are made – Redeployment of a subflow is automatically picked up by any consumers

•  Models are needed for parsing, validation and transformation – Models avoid the need to write custom code to parse messages!

Message Modelling

•  Graphical mapper requires models to display the message structure – ESQL editor provides in line validation of code that navigates message trees

Message Modelling

•  XML documents and messages are modelled using XML schemas – XSDs and WSDLs are deployed directly to the runtime – no import required!

•  Non XML data (both text and binary) is defined using DFDL schemas – Data Format Description Language standardised through the Open Grid Forum – DFDL schemas replace message set projects and the MRM message domain –  Input nodes support DFDL alongside XMLNSC, JSON, MRM etc

•  New model based tooling to design and test DFDL schema models – Test parsing and test data generation built into editor! – As with XSDs, DFDL schemas are also deployed directly to the runtime

2. Design for Performance and Scalability

Design for Performance

•  There are several areas that incur a processing cost – Parsing and serialization of messages as they enter and exit the flow –  Integration logic such as transformations executed during message processing – Transformation cost includes general complexity, tree navigation and tree copying – External resources such as interactions with databases and queue managers

• Message flow design is critical to achieve high performance and scalability – For example using global units of work to achieve transactionality across a flow

•  Performance is a large (and important) topic in its own right – There is a wealth of information and guidance available online!

Design for Performance

•  Loops in a message flow are exactly like a recursive function call – So each iteration of the loop consumes some stack space

•  Avoid loops unless you are certain that the number of iterations will not become large – Stack overflows will bring down the execution group along with all running

flows! – There is usually an alternative design that avoids looping

Design for Scalability

•  Large messages can consume large amounts of memory/CPU •  There is an industry trend toward larger data sets

– Already apparent in IIB deployments •  A flow with a large memory overhead can

– slow down other flows by causing swapping –  in the worst case, bring down the execution group

•  Recommendations – Consider whether a message 10 times the current size would be able to be

handled without a problem – Where appropriate, use large message handling techniques in your flows

( see Large Messaging sample )

3. Design for Administration

Applications, Libraries, Services and REST APIs

•  Applications package end-to-end connectivity solutions – The concept of an application is shared between the toolkit and runtime – Applications are deployed and managed as a single unit of isolation

•  Libraries package resources for reuse (flows, scripts, models) •  Resources in an application are not visible to anything else

– Use applications to manage your solutions inside an execution group •  A Service is an Application with a well defined interface (WSDL) •  A REST API is an Application built from a Swagger definition

Shared Libraries

•  New shared container for reusable artefacts – Subflows, message models (XSD, DFDL) – ESQL, maps – NOT flows!

•  Saves memory – Multiple applications can reference a single copy of a shared lib

•  Separately deployable from the application •  Shared libraries have no running state

– Cannot be started or stopped – No runtime threads assigned

•  v8/9 static libraries continue to work as before

V10

Static Libraries verses Shared Libraries

•  Static Libraries •  Shared Libraries (v10)

App1 Lib1 Lib2

App2 Lib1 Lib2

App3 Lib1 Lib2

App1

App2

ShLib1

ShLib2

App3

Configurable Services

•  Use configurable services to externalize deployment time properties – Allows deployment information to be configured by a system administrator – For example, credentials for the database nodes and FTP server and port –  Ideal for moving solutions through staging environments (test to production)

Monitoring

• Monitoring tools available via Web UI and Integration Explorer – Statistics monitor resource usage across execution groups – Range of options to update and visualise the resource statistics – Activity Logging to focus on resource usage

Monitoring

• Monitoring also provided on individual message flows – Quick and easy way to identify hot spots in your solutions!

4. Design with Interfaces

Web Services

•  Drag and drop WSDL to generate integration service – Generates a sub-flow for each SOAP operation – Framework manages invocation of sub-flows and error handlers

REST APIs

•  New container type for implementing REST APIs • Generates framework based on Swagger definition

V10

5. Design consistently

Patterns for Simplified Development

•  Creates top-down, parameterized connectivity solutions

•  Reduces common problems in flow development

•  Establishes best practices for integration •  Reduces time-to-value for solution

development •  Patterns are easily extended with regular

IIB functionality

Pattern Generation

•  Pattern generation creates the production ready projects – Generated projects reflect the configuration choices of the pattern user – Configuration is saved so that the pattern can be re-generated if required

Built-In Patterns

•  Integration Bus provides a core set of built-in patterns •  These implement a variety of common scenarios

– Web service front end to a MQ based application – Processing data stored in a file and routing to one or more queues – Adding a proxy in front of a web service provider – Processing data from an SAP system and routing to MQ – Shredding messages and routing to one or more queues

•  Patterns are selected based on client feedback and field experience •  This core set of patterns continues to grow with each release

Pattern Authoring

•  Pattern becomes even more useful when you can create your own! – Every organization has their own repeating connectivity patterns! – Pattern authoring is the name we give to this technology in WMB and

Integration Bus • We recommend you start with a working solution

– One or more projects

•  Pattern authoring is a design activity –  It may be long lived –  It is often not sequential

•  Using patterns is a top-down activity driven by a requirement, but: – Authoring a working solution is (typically) a bottom-up activity – So pattern authoring bridges these two different approaches

•  Patterns have their own development cycle – Pattern Authoring editor supports this design activity

Create Your Working Solution

•  No change at all - design your solutions as you do today – Pattern authoring does not change the tools you use to create solutions – The key to a good pattern is to create a good working solution!

Design Your Pattern

•  Straightforward to create patterns using the Pattern Authoring editor! – Design the user interface which is presented to your pattern users – Easy to add branding - style sheets, images and other files as required

Pattern Refinement

•  Pattern authoring supports property changes – Node, user-defined properties (UDPs) and promoted node properties

•  Property variability is the most common type of variability that a pattern might need to express - there are many others: – Generate application text files such as ESQL scripts – Make structural changes to Message Flows – Create administration files such as MQSC scripts

•  It is impossible to try and predict all the possible extensions that a pattern author might wish to implement

• We provide two ways to extend pattern authoring – Java code that is invoked when pattern instances are generated – PHP templates that generate text files in pattern instance projects

Packaging a Pattern

Integra(onAPI

•  The Integration API is our Java application development API – Packaged along with the administration API in ConfigManagerProxy.jar – Provides a complete Java API to manipulate message flows (and subflows)

•  The Integration API can be used in standalone applications or in patterns – Wide variety of applications are now possible such as business data mashups – Easy to implement mass creation of message flows during migration projects

6. Test! Flow Exerciser

V10

Flow Exerciser

Click to start recording

Flow Exerciser

Flow Exerciser

Now recording – the flow is greyed out (read-only)

Flow Exerciser

Flow Exerciser

Flow Exerciser

Path through the flow is highlighted

Click to see message content

Can re-send the recorded messages (logical tree assembly)

Summary

•  Use the features of WMB & IIB to their full extent! – Message modelling, transformation options, applications and libraries – Capabilities link in with activity trace, record edit replay, and more

•  Libraries and subflows make for simpler designs – Deployable subflows and libraries extend the benefits to the runtime

•  Consider production and performance early on in your design –  In particular, applications and configurable services – Your system administrator will thank you for this!

•  Patterns address time-to-value for your solutions –  It takes just a few minutes to create a pattern! – Why not create a patterns community in your organisation?

•  Developer Edition – Free edition of IB for use in evaluation, dev and test usage – Fully functional: all nodes available and no time limitations – Throughput rate limited to 1TPS per integration flow

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