Developing integrations in the IBM App Connect Enterprise Toolkit

Use the IBM® App Connect Enterprise Toolkit to develop integration solutions that comprise message flows and resources that those flows need to transform, enrich, route, and process your business messages and data.

About this task

The Toolkit provides capabilities to connect on-premises applications and systems, but message flows can also use the extensive range of connectors that are available through App Connect Designer. You can deploy the message flows that you develop in the Toolkit to IBM App Connect Enterprise or App Connect. You can also develop message flows that call other flows, and are called by other flows (callable flows) to create hybrid integrations that run across distributed cloud and on-premises environments.

The IBM App Connect Enterprise Toolkit is part of App Connect Enterprise. When you install App Connect Enterprise on Windows or Linux®, an instance of the Toolkit is installed by default. Alternatively, you can download IBM App Connect Enterprise Evaluation Edition (previously known as App Connect Enterprise for Developers or Developer Edition) for no charge. You can follow a tutorial to download and set up App Connect Enterprise Evaluation Edition in the App Connect Enterprise documentation. You can also find detailed instructions there for how to develop an integration (see Developing integration solutions.) The following steps describe at a high level how you develop an integration in the Toolkit and the following screenshot introduces you to the interface.

A screenshot of the App Connect Enterprise Toolkit

Procedure

The following steps outline how to develop an integration in the Toolkit.

  1. Create an application. An application (and the special types of integration service and REST API) is the container for resources that are needed to develop your solution.
  2. Optional: Create a library to contain a logical group of related code, schemas, message models, and other resources that can be reused.
  3. Optional: To include one or more libraries of resources in your application, create references to those libraries.
  4. Create one or more message flows in your application to define the sequence of steps that process your business data. Add message flow nodes to the flow, and configure their connections and properties.
    Tip: To provide error handling in your flows, use the message flow terminals. For example, you might want to process errors in a particular way or roll back database updates if the flow doesn't complete successfully. For more information, see Handling errors in message flows in the App Connect Enterprise documentation.
  5. Create other resources that you need in the application and library, such as message models that enable App Connect Enterprise to understand the message formats to process.

    Not all App Connect Enterprise resources or features are supported in App Connect. For more information, see Supported resources in imported BAR files.

  6. Package the integration into a BAR file that you can import into App Connect.
    Restriction: The name of a BAR file that you deploy to App Connect can contain a maximum of 32 characters.
  7. Deploy the integration in App Connect by uploading the BAR file and creating a runtime to run the BAR file. For more information, see Deploying integrations.
    You can import up to 500 BAR files to an instance of App Connect. When you deploy a flow that you created in the App Connect flow editor, it is automatically added to a BAR file. These system-generated BAR files are listed on the BAR files page and contribute to the limit of 500 BAR files.