Developing integrations in the IBM App Connect Enterprise Toolkit

The IBM® App Connect Enterprise Toolkit is an integrated development environment and graphical user interface that is based on the Eclipse platform. You can use the 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 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 in the App Connect Enterprise documentation to download and set up App Connect Enterprise Evaluation Edition.

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 App Connect Enterprise or IBM App Connect in containers. 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 containerized and on-premises environments.

The following image depicts the screen elements of the Toolkit interface. For more information, see IBM App Connect Enterprise Toolkit in the App Connect Enterprise documentation.

An image of the App Connect Enterprise Toolkit interface

Procedure

The following steps outline how to use the Toolkit to develop an integration, which you can later deploy to App Connect in containers.

  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 grouping 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.
  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.
    Restriction: Not all App Connect Enterprise resources or features are supported in App Connect in containers. For more information, see Supported resources in BAR files that are deployed to IBM App Connect in containers.
  6. Test the integration solution.

For detailed instructions about how to develop and test integrations in the Toolkit, see Developing integration solutions and Testing and troubleshooting message flows in the App Connect Enterprise documentation.

What to do next

To run the Toolkit integration in a production system in App Connect in containers, deploy it as an integration runtime in the App Connect Dashboard, which provides a runtime environment.

  1. Package the Toolkit integration into a broker archive (BAR) file that you can import into App Connect in containers.
  2. Upload the BAR file to an App Connect Dashboard instance and then deploy the file to an integration runtime to run the integration in the production system.

For more information, see Deploying App Connect Designer and IBM App Connect Enterprise Toolkit integrations in the App Connect Dashboard.

You can also use the Red Hat® OpenShift® web console or CLI, or the CLI for a Kubernetes environment to deploy Toolkit integrations to integration runtimes. For more information, see App Connect Integration Runtime reference.

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