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Introduction

This book is a simple introduction to a simple system. Make no mistake; the word simple is used here in its most positive and powerful context, because the best way to wrap your mind around a complex problem is to simplify it; Break it down into more manageable pieces and then master those constituent parts. Divide and conquer. This is a technique you instinctively use to solve everyday problems, and which is equally relevant for engineering information exchange across an office, an enterprise or the globe.

If you are impatient to quickly start extracting information from files, directories, databases or Lotus Notes® and transferring this data someplace else then you may want to skip directly to the appendix, EasyETL Guide. This feature lets you harness the power of IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator without having to first learn core concepts. Instead you choose your source and target, and then press Run and watch your data flow. If on the other hand you want more control over how data is read, filtered, enriched, transformed and moved then continue reading here; EasyETL Guide will still be there for your future reading pleasure.

IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator¹ is designed and built on the premise that even the most complex integration problems can be decomposed down into three basic parts:

  • The systems involved in the communication – also called data sources,
  • The data flows between these systems,
  • The events that trigger the data flows.

With IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator you translate this atomic understanding of the integration problem directly into a solution, building it incrementally, one flow at a time, with continuous feedback and verification. This approach makes integration projects easier to estimate and plan, sometimes reducing this effort to the counting and costing the individual data flows to be implemented. Completing a task in runnable steps also allows you to regularly demonstrate progress to stakeholders.

IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator further accelerates development by abstracting away the technical differences between your data sources, allowing you to spend more time concentrating on the business requirements.

Leveraging the power of Eclipse, the IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator development environment is both comprehensive and extensible. Integration projects result in libraries of components and business logic that can be quickly reused to address new challenges. As a result, teams across your organization can share IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator assets, resulting in independent projects – even point solutions – that immediately fit into a coherently integrated and managed infrastructure.

This document gives you an introduction to the simplify and solve methodology described above. You will also take your first steps toward tapping into the elegant simplicity of the IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator toolset, specifically these two programs:

  • The development environment, called the Configuration Editor, or 'CE' for short,
  • The run-time engine, simply referred to as the Server.

You will assemble your IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator solutions with the CE, while one or more Servers are used to power them. These programs work in concert, making the user experience seamless, and even allowing you to work across platforms; for example, developing on your laptop while testing and debugging solutions running remotely on a mainframe.

Scripting in JavaScript

As mentioned above, IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator lets you rapidly assemble integration solutions. However, in order to extend built-in automated functionality with your own custom processing and flow behavior, you will need to write snippets of script.

Scripting is done in JavaScript, and IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator includes the IBM JSEngine to provide a fast, reliable scripting environment. As a result, you will need to use and understand the core JavaScript language. There are several good online and hardcopy resources for learning JavaScript. Check the IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator newsgroups and websites for recommendations and links.

For more information about scripting in IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator, see the Configuring Directory Integrator.

Installing IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator

IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator installs in a few minutes and you can begin building, testing and deploying solutions immediately. It runs on a wide variety of platforms, including Microsoft Windows, IBM AIX®, IBM System z®, and a number of UNIX and Linux environments.

There are three paths of interest when installing IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator, and the installer will ask you to specify the first two:

  1. The Installation Directory, where the program files are kept, along with the batch-files or scripts used to launch the various tools.
  2. The Solution Directory, often abbreviated 'SolDir', which is the current folder whenever you run IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator. You will notice that the startup batch-files and scripts for the Config Editor development environment (ibmditk) and the Server (ibmdisrv) both start with a command to change directory to the Solution Directory. As a result, all relative paths used in your solution will be expanded from your Solution Directory.
  3. The workspace folder. This is where your project and resource² files are kept. This will default to a folder named "workspace" in your Solution Directory.

For more information about installing the IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator, see IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator installation instructions in the Installing and Administering.

Installing the tutorial files

The tutorial exercises in this book require supporting data files that are located in the *examples/Tutorial sub-folder of the IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator installation directory. For example, a standard Windows installation would place these files in the following directory: *

C:\Program Files\IBM\TDI\V10.0.0\examples\Tutorial

The 'Tutorial' directory should contain the following files:

  • CreatePhoneDB.assemblyline
  • index.html
  • OtherPage.html
  • People.csv
  • PhoneNumbers.xml
  • readme.txt
  • Return web page.script

Note: As mentioned in the previous section, the installer will ask you to specify the location of your Solution Directory. This is where your project and resource files will be stored, and it will typically be a sub-directory called My Documents\TDI under your home area.

Copy the Tutorial folder to your Solution Directory in order to make it readily accessible from the Configuration Editor tooling.

  • Simplify and solve This section helps you to understand your starting place when designing a data integration solution. Although the design strategy is incremental, it is suitable for any size of integration and systems deployment project, including large ones.

¹ Don't let the name fool you; IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator is not limited to directory work, and supports all major data stores, transports, protocols and APIs – including of course LDAP directories.

² These terms are explained in Introducing IBM® Security Verify Directory Integrator