I've recently been talking to a few friends about the applications which various integration products claim to support integration into. It's quite an interesting thing to consider these days and for some vendors it's a great way of looking really cool by having loads of application icons showing how many apps you can integrate with. In BizTalk world a few years ago we used to be in a really good place but I think now a days BizTalk looks weak in this space when compared against some competitors. The thing I always wonder is, "Is this an actual weakness or just a perceived one"?
If you look at most modern applications today then tend to support either a SOAP or a REST API and more and more are going that way. If that's the case then if you have a SOAP and a REST adapter then surely you can connect to all of these applications? Well in the real world you tend to find that "yes that is actually the case". You might not have dragged a pretty branded icon onto your designer but by using the REST or SOAP adapters you can then integrate into the vast majority of these applications.
I always used to think that BizTalk adapters fell into the following categories (with a few examples):
Protocol Adapter
- SOAP
- REST
- FTP
- File
- MLLP
- MSMQ
- MQ-Series
Application Adapters
- SharePoint
- SAP
- Oracle E-Business
What you have tended to find over the years is that the application adapters have become less common as vendors tend to move their interfaces over to an API model with support for a protocol adapter. This is a good thing as it means buying an adapter which doesn't come out of the box should be less common and its then just a case of configuring the adapter correctly and sending the right data.
At this point your probably thinking "Wasn't Mike supposed to be talking about accelerators"? Well yes that was the aim of this article. So if we are in a world now where most integration is done via API's and we have a few protocol adapters which speak the languages of these API's already then surely all we need now is to create the appropriate message types and configure the adapters correctly. Actually that's pretty much the case. So getting to the point of this article this means that the key gap we have in terms of application connectivity isnt so much adapters its more about guidance and making it easier. What id like to see is the creation of more accelerators for BizTalk which speed the development of integration with these key applications. For some reason people have never really built many community driven accelerators and I think their has been a bit of a perception that they should be for hard problems like HL7. Why cant accelerators help me for simpler integration problems? If I want to integrate with Twitter and I can grab an accelerator which gives me all of the schemas for the right version of Twitter and tells me how to configure the adapter that should be pretty awesome.
To get a bit more detailed I envision a scenario where I am deciding to integrate with DropBox so in my visual studio solution I can just go to nuget and download the BizTalk accelerator for dropbox. This will automatically give me the schemas required to do the main actions with Dropbox and also the binding samples with configuration required and a central place to go for guidance on this accelerator. If we followed this model we could easily create accelerators for:
- Dropbox
- Box
- Amazon SNS
- Amazon AWS
- Windows Azure
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Get Satisfaction
- Google Apps
- Linked In
- Dynamics CRM
- SharePoint
For most of the functionality these accelerators would just become versioned schemas and configuration and guidance. This would make them a great candidate to be developed outside of full BizTalk Server or BizTalk Services releases and also potentially developed and released by the community. I think this could offer a number of opportunities for vendor or community lead initiatives.
There would of course be some gaps, but that is where we should try to get Microsoft to focus their efforts. Some of the gaps would be around protocol adapters such as AMQP and MQTT and these are the type of things we want Microsoft solving properly with full product support for important protocols. We would also want them to provide support for something like a polling REST adapter or similar for some usage scenarios.
Ok so here is the challenge for the next year. Let's as a community see if we can get the BizTalk accelerator ecosystem into an awesome place, stick a comment on this post with ideas on any accelerators you would like to see then lets get some people teamed up and starting some github projects or codeplex projects to create community accelerators. After this let's get them on nugget and get a little guidance on how to use it and perhaps a demo video on YouTube or something.
If you do anything cool in this space please let me know as I'd gladly buy you a pint!