Our experts Glenn, Jason, Jurgen, and Kevin dedicated an i8c FastTrack Day to examining the TIBCO iPaaS offering. Check out their Research & Development day report to learn what they uncovered. ?
The TIBCO Cloud™ Integration enterprise integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) provides self-service integration capabilities that empowers anyone to quickly and easily connect information assets no matter where they are.
It offers a variety of different applicationsproducts all with their own specific goals and functionalities.
The Use Case is to connect Magento, serving as an eCommerce service which is a self-managed web shop for end users where they can register and place orders for products. This Magento instance needs to be integrated with the company’s Salesforce instance which is used as its central business application.
Looking at the original design, we should be using TIBCO BusinessWorks 6 for the integration between SalesForce and Magento. However, after a brief internal discussion, we quickly decided not to use it, but try to use TIBCO Scribe instead. Main reason being that it is not serverless and would require us to use a client application which needs to be installed locally and that’s not ideal for an iPaas solution. Furthermore, the integration tasks required, could also be done using Scribe.
TIBCO Scribe was looking promising as a good alternative for BusinessWorks. Up till the point where we wanted to use and configure the Magento connector. Unfortunately, the only connector available for Scribe is created by a third party and requires a separate subscription. There’s also no way to use it temporarily within the foreseen subscription. This means that we were forced to also drop Scribe as our main integrator.
This leaves us with TIBCO Flogo, which we already supposed to use as a secondary integration tool, but will now use for all our integration tasks. Flogo is serverless, can perform all tasks needed and has a magento connector which is free to use.
I – Creating the API on Magento
The first task is to create the Integration part of Magento.
This is done by creating an “Integration”:
Once it is created, tokens are generated and can be used to create the connection within Flogo:
The only one that matters is the “Access Token” that should be used in the Connection panel for Magento:
Once the connection is setup and being tested successfully, it can finally be integrated into Flogo flows as configured as needed:
In our opinion TIBCO offers three tools to support this case: TIBCO Scribe, TIBCO BusinessWork 6 and TIBCO Flogo. We did not consider BusinessWorks 6 as a candidate as we would like to implement the solution with web tools.
We categorized ‘Product’ within data integration. This made it a perfect candidate for TIBCO Scribe. The integration with Salesforce is an easy out of the box solution. We weren’t able to implement the Magento part because the need of a separate third-party connector. Game out for Scribe…
Eventually we could solve the main goals with Flogo once we figured out how to setup events from Salesforce.
TIBCO has a lot of connectors/plugins to connect various applications. What we experienced is that not all the plains are managed by TIBCO, which result that plugins which are free for Flogo needs to be paid in Scribe and vice versa. Some crucial connectors aren’t available (like Teams, …) and have to be hand crafted.
After working with TIBCO BusinessWorks 5, we have the impression that the modern integration tools offered by TIBCO are not as stable and mature as we are used to.
