Low Code Development Platform (LCDP) in the world of integration - Is it right?

Background and Overview

Before we get all worked-up and passionate about our favorite platforms (case in point - Dell Boomi AtomSphere and Fuse Integration Services), I just wanted to understand if the invasion of LCDP is a sign of good things to come everywhere. Obviously I hate this term called “Citizen Developer”; but that’s for a different day and time. Also I want to steer clear of the argument of “Commercial, Proprietary” vs “Open source”. That is not a very important differentiator in this context, in my humble opinion. Pricing models employed, however can be a point of argument. But let’s focus on something else.

Low Code Development Platforms outside of Integration

There have always been efforts to promote LCDP when it came to structured workflow and tools that required the ability to build a quick and easy workflow on top of an existing platform (say ServiceNow for example). LCDP also seemed to make sense when the user-base was minimal (of the order of say 100 users). This certainly made life simpler in the CRM space (involving Sales/Marketing personnel) or in the service fulfillment space (e.g. ticketing systems for End-User computing). I’m sure the Salesforce community will vouch for this.

LCDP for everything else!! 

Now we come to the topics of API Management, Master Data Management and Application Integration. Clearly players like TIBCO, Red Hat, Talend ESB, MuleSoft (SalesForce) saw a benefit in easing the effort associated. If one observes the trend in these products in favor of ease of development, this has basically been the dumbing down of development with the ease of a GUI interface that helps create, publish and deploy integration projects (and now even as containerized deployments).

Having seen the workflow for developing API-centric projects, it still makes sense to have a strong and easy to use tooling strategy. Master Data Management is not for “Citizen Developers”. It is for the Data experts. The less I comment on LCDP for MDM, the better.

Boiling point topic - Integration with LCDP!! What? Really! 

What is the USP here? 

• “I don’t know any of the 70 odd Enterprise Integration patterns”
• “I don’t know Java”
• “I don’t know anything about containerization”
• “I’m an Analyst”
• “I’m not an Integration Developer (have no background of having burnt half my body with SOA, ESB, Brokers and Streams)”

And yet….Welcome to the Jungle and integrate systems with consummate ease !! Yes, that’s the marketing/selling point!

“The core function, Boomi Integration, is built around the “atom”, a single-tenant, single-node Java runtime engine containing connectors, transformation rules, decision handling, and processing logic. A “molecule” is collection of atoms spread across multiple nodes (for high availability or load-balancing), and an “atom cloud” is a collection of molecules (for multi-tenancy). In addition to their utility in application integration, atoms, molecules, and atom clouds are components of Dell Boomi’s capabilities in Master Data Hub and API Management, but not Boomi Flow” - I’m liking this lingo already now; but… :)

What’s the noise in the community made by the LCDP IACD (Integration Analyst Citizen Developer) crowd?

• “I’m having significant performance issues with the integration projects and I don’t know where the bottleneck is”?
• “Is there no simple way to reverse engineer the generated code and optimize it”?
• “Can I port this project outside of the Boomi’s iPaas”?
• “I have a complex integration scenario” How do I address it?
• “How do I debug this workflow”?
• “Can I turn off reporting to resolve performance issues” - Really? Haw!
• “I’m a Business Analyst. How do you expect me to debug integration issues"

Get the drift???

Conclusions

If you’ve started struggling with the above problems and don’t have answers, it is clear that the LCDP platform you chose was WRONG! Integration technologies are still backbones. They cannot be choking points. If you still want an LCDP for integration, ensure that you have access to the fullly auto-generated code and it is easy to customize / modify auto-generated GUI delivered codebases, can lend itself to high performance usage. Pricing models shouldn’t throw surprises when the complexity of your integration increases. Hence…now for my shameless plug - choose Fuse (if at all you need the best of LCDP for integration). If you’re still not convinced (obviously because I’ve stated so little and we didn’t talk anything about the connector ecosystem), let’s have a nice chat about it! :)

Stay safe, be good and integrate well! :)