Blog posts

This post is all about the different ways you can use SELECT in ACE: returning arrays, rows, or just that one perfect value. To clarify, I’ve built out a quick demo flow with a very simple message structure, grabbed the outputs, and broken it all down for you.

If you’ve worked with IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE) for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with the repetitive nature of installations. Each setup involves the same predictable steps: unpacking the release files, configuring directories, updating scripts, adjusting ODBC entries, setting up the runtime environment, and verifying that everything runs smoothly. While these steps might seem routine, the manual process is inherently prone to human error.

In this blog I’ll approach the challenge of dynamic execution of mappings. That means, the execution of mapping artifacts (procedures, graphical mapping routines or even XSL transformations) that are not fixed during design time and are only retrieved from configuration assets in runtime.

When managing a number of topics in Event Endpoint Management(EEM) doing everything in the user interface can be a tedious job and prone to mistake. So it's probably a good Idea to connect this configuration into some sort of CI/CD pipeline that automatically creates the configuration when for instance the topic is created on the Kafka broker.

In certain scenarios, you may require a policy to effectively test your nodes. This could be a database connection policy or a custom-defined policy. This post outlines the steps involved in enabling such policies.

Effective logging is crucial for creating and managing integrations, ensuring that troubleshooting is as efficient as possible. The Log Node can be especially valuable, often replacing the Trace Node in various scenarios.

In the world of IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE), effective logging is crucial for monitoring and troubleshooting. With the introduction of the Log node, it's now easier than ever to log ExceptionList inserts directly into the activity log, which can be viewed from the WebUI. This blog will guide you through the process of using the Log node to log these inserts, helping you streamline your debugging and monitoring processes.

With all the new discovery connectors in the toolkit, it can be tricky to maintain an clear view on the nodes you actually use. Luckily the palette is customizable and allows you to order and hide the node groups that are available. This guide will help you personalize your palette in a few simple steps.

Last week, I had the incredible opportunity to attend the IBM TechXchange early eXperience program for IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE) at the historic Hursley House in England. This event was a blend of insightful sessions, hands-on labs, and valuable networking with IBM architects, developers, and business partners from around the globe. With 160 attendees representing over 50 organizations and 25 countries, it was a truly diverse and enriching experience.

IBM MQ File Transfer Edition (FTE) empowers users to efficiently move files between different locations, whether it's via file shares, SFTP, or MQ queues. Setting up agents or bridge agents allows for seamless file transfers, either through scheduled tasks or more sophisticated resource monitoring mechanisms.

The recently concluded IBMTechXchange Summit EMEA in Barcelona left attendees buzzing with excitement, as IBM specialists came together to showcase advancements and shared knowledge. From cutting-edge AI developments to sustainable tech solutions, here are my key takeaways from this year’s event.

I had the possibility to do an internship at Integration Designers during the final year of my IT studies. The topic was to investigate how easily one could move App Connect Enterprise applications from a local openshift cluster to a cluster managed in the cloud. Technologies I was required to use were IBM app connect enterprise, OpenShift , ArgoCD and gitlab.

In the examples below, I’m utilizing IBM’s offered operator to deploy an integration server on OpenShift. I can build an integration server using this operator and a variety of OpenShift resources.

I received a request from my current client to retrieve messages, that are published on the Azure service Bus, using App Connect Enterprise v12 and forward the messages to the onsite MQ infrastructure. It was the first time I connected with ACE to Azure Service Bus, so I turned to the Azure documentation. It’s necessary to know which Azure tier the client has because there are some differences according to the Azure documentation.

Today automated builds and deployments are a must to support business demands. IBM App Connect Enterprise (ace) offers strong capabilities to automate build and deployments. In this blog we highlight the different options available out of the box and share our view on the pros and cons.

I wanted to try the new (re-introduced in 12.0.2.0) ACE Business Transaction Monitoring to see what the added value could be for a company/team/environment that didn’t have this type of monitoring in place yet. In my search for the “how does this work” I came across 2 YouTube entries by Sanjay Nagchowdhury that were great to get me going, but they lacked some parts of the setup like the required database and security should you expose the dashboard.

Meet Jason Verlinden. He’s studying Information Security Management at Thomas More and he recently finished his internship at Redify, a division of Integration Designers Let’s have a look at how Jason experienced his time with us.

Today automated builds and deployments are a must to support business demands. IBM App Connect Enterprise (ace) offers strong capabilities to automate build and deployments. In this blog we highlight the different options available out of the box and share our view on the pros and cons.

Meet Wannes, our brand new Junior Integration Engineer who recently joined our IBM integration community. He hit the ground running, immersing himself in a comprehensive training program on IBM API Connect during his first weeks with us.

App Connect Enterprise supports the Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface (REST API), which you can use to administer integration nodes, integration servers, and other resources.

Recently, one of our clients asked me if it would be possible to verify reCAPTCHA tokens using @IBM API Connect. reCAPTCHA is a tool that verifies if a user is human. This verification happens in the front-end by the means of a button, through small tests such as “select the images with chimneys” or by scanning the page for unnatural movements of the cursor or focus.

A few weeks ago, Zakaria joined the team as a junior integration engineer. If we would describe him in just a few words, we would say “Zakaria is curious with a contagious passion for IT and learning.” We asked Zakaria 8 questions to learn how he experienced his first weeks at Integration Designers.

Imagine that you have an integration in which you receive booking messages (might be as files from an FTP folder, or via an MQ queue…) and perform an operation that requires access to its content (like a mapping). Also imagine that different partners will send you the messages in different formats, like plain text and XML, because they are familiar with them.

Since App Connect Enterprise v11 Fixpack 6 a new way of storing data records is provided. A vault can be used to encrypt and decrypt data records using symmetric encryption. Symmetric encryption is a type of encryption where only one key (a secret key) is used to both encrypt and decrypt information. In this case AES 256-bit encryption is used to encrypt this data. 256-bit AES encryption refers to the process of concealing plaintext data using the AES algorithm and an AES key length of 256 bits. In addition, 256 bits is the largest AES key length size, as well as its most mathematically complex. It is also the most difficult to crack.

One of the many advantages of being a business partner from IBM is we get regularly invited to some workshops were IBM shares their vision and insight on there product portfolio. Last week I was able to attend the GSI Lab workshop “IBM Hybrid Cloud Platform 2022 Update” in the IBM Systems Centre of Montpellier. My key takeaway I got from this event was that IBM really has succeeded in implementing its vision on a hybrid cloud. The “Build once. Deploy anywhere”.

Hey, I’m Robin Thoelen and I recently started my Integration Career at Integration Designers. As an Integration Consultant, I use IBM and Red Hat technology to connect applications The day I changed my LinkedIn profile to ‘open to work’, I was bombarded with messages! After finishing my bachelor in ‘Applied Computer Science’, I indicated on my LinkedIn profile that I was “open to work”. I was immediately bombarded with messages from recruiters with often very interesting offers.

The Transformation Advisor tool (TA for short) is a program that comes with the ACE v11 and v12 installation. It takes your old (v10) sources, launches a standalone container, deploys the sources, and matches the result against a set of rules, to determine if any actions need to be taken before migrating to ACE. At the end of the report, you should also get a rough estimate on how long it should take you to mitigate complex issues (however, this estimate did not show up in my demo but that might be because I did not have any red severities)

In my previous blog, I’ve created my first v12 unit test project. So I was wondering how I could include this test project in a CI/CD pipeline using maven. I decided to create a small proof of concept. As-Is situation: When I commit changes to my git, a maven build is triggered that creates my bar files and pushes them in my nexus repository. This nexus repository is used to deploy the code to my runtime.

With App Connect Enterprise V12, IBM introduced a test framework to facilitate test-driven development. In my opinion, this is a great addition to the product. When using this test functionality errors can be identified much faster in the development lifecycle. A developer can test locally fix-packs or new product versions and the impact they will have on existing integration flows. Tests can run isolated, on a build server or developer laptop, without requiring external services. The test project can also be included in your existing CI/CD pipeline.

As most of you know already a vulnerability was detected (Log4Shell – CVE-2021-44228) in the popular java logging framework Log4j. Some of our customers had some questionq on how this impacts the IBM middleware products.

In most cases within API management, APIs exist out of a JSON or XML structured payloads. However, in some cases it can be beneficial or is even required to use payloads that are structured in multipart/form-data. For instance when a file is being transmitted. Each value is sent as a block of data (a part of the payload), with a user defined delimiter (a boundary) separating each part.

I wanted to experiment a bit with the latest new features from IBM API Connect v10.0.2.0. I thought let’s perform a quick install on the IBM Kubernetes Service (IKS). As it is from the same vendor it should be easy …

IBM API Connect provides a default ‘Validation’ policy. In case you would like to use this policy to validate API definitions (example given: the body of a POST message), it will provide a default error message. In case you want to do something with the error response of the ‘Validate’ policy (example given: map the message to your company’s standard), you can do this following the steps described in this blog.

APIC 2018 has multiple ways of administration access, the most well-known and used being the web GUI. Another way is using the inbuilt management API’s which is a great option for automation. This guide will focus on using some of those API’s together with Postman to do some basic automated administrative tasks. We’ll be mostly focusing on creation of Consumer (old Developer) Organizations, Applications, Setting groups, and changing credentials.

OAuth 2.0: Secure server to server application connections with GCP as third party OAuth provider

In the past we have built a UDP (User Defined Policy) to sign SOAP messages before sending them to an external server. The goal of this UDP was, that this UDP would be used for one specific partner (all parameters where hardcoded in the policy rule in the gateway). However, as we are receiving more and more SOAP service projects, we needed to make this UDP open to be customizable. We wanted to be able to provide parameters to the UDP so it was no longer fixed for one partner only. Example of parameters:

Because Eduardo has long been intrigued by the world of integration, his main goal has always been to grow his skills in this area of expertise. With the ambition of becoming a real technical integration expert, Eduardo today works as a technical lead at Lineas, where he leads the implementation of a new integration platform.

Throughout his entire career, Niki was passionate about people and technology. Two fields of interest that led to an important choice regarding his professional career: growing into aproduct specialist –and become a real technical expert -or aiming for a steering rolein which he directs others?

To successfully complete a project at one of our clients, the demand arose to sign SOAP messages before sending them to an external server. As SOAP signing was not supported (at the time of writing), a custom solution was needed. At first, we wrote gateway scripts which initially to sign SOAP messages. Given that we needed to reuse the SOAP signing in multiple API’s we decided to develop a User Defined Policy (UDP) to replace the gateway scripts. This allows for easier reuse across multiple API’s.

A cost-efficient setup of IBM API Connect (APIC) has been deployed to Amazon EKS. To achieve this, per environment, a single instance of the API Manager, Developer Portal and Analytics subsystem is deployed to a ‘mgmt’ worker node. In the production environment three replicas of the API Gateway are deployed, one gateway per availability zone. Business can also look at a identity and access management solution like HelloID to easily manage your organization and mitigate any security threats.

After his IT-studies, Alexander was looking for a varied and challenging first job experience. Lots of IT-graduates start their career as a developer, however, Alexander always knew he didn’t want to narrow his skills to pure development. That’s how Alexander started a challenging integration career at Integration Designers.

An analysis team at a client was looking for an easy to use tool to visualize XSD’s and WSDL’s. As this was not a technical team, but a team that has a focus on the business and functional aspect of a project, there was no interest in seeing the contracts in its source form. An extra wish for the tool was that it should be freeware or very low cost as this team did not work very often with these type of contracts. This already eliminated products like Altova Spy XML and Oxygen XML due to the price linked to them. In this article, I would like to elaborate on several tools available and my personal preferences.

A few weeks ago, I attended a big IBM training event about IBM’s e-commerce offering. During the conference, a new brand name was released: “Watson Customer Engagement”. My primary interest was the B2B integration solution of IBM, that is part of this suite and falls under the category “Watson Supply Chain”.