Integration Flow Engine Sample Clauses

Integration Flow Engine. Integration Flow Engine (IFE) component of the Data Spine aims to bridge the interoperability gaps at the protocol level and the data model level between the heterogeneous services communicating through the Data Spine, in order to create composite applications. To enable interoperability among the services on the fly, the IFE makes use of dataflows or “Integration Flows”. The IFE is thus designed as a dataflow management system based on the concepts from flow-based programming. It provides functionalities such as connectivity, data routing, data transformation and system mediation. The integration flows are designed and implemented as directed graphs that have ‘processors’ at their vertices and the edges represent the direction of the dataflow. The processors are of different types depending upon the functionality they provide: The processors of type ‘Protocol Connector’ address the issue of interlinking the services that use heterogeneous communication protocols, the processors of type ‘Data Transformation Processor’ provide the means for transforming between data models and message formats, etc. The edges that represent the flow of information support routing of data based on certain parameters. The IFE provides functionality for the lifecycle management of the integration flows. The IFE supports the Request-Response as well as the Pub/Sub communication pattern. An instance of the Integration Flow Engine should have built-in Protocol Connectors for standard communication protocols that are widely used in the industry. The functionality of the IFE can be extended by writing and adding custom processors to the IFE instance. For example, support for a new protocol can be added by writing a new Protocol Connector and adding it to the IFE instance. The IFE offers an intuitive, drag-and-drop style Web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) to the service consumers or system integrators to create the integration flows which is based on the concepts from visual programming. This interface, the use of integration flows, and the built-in building blocks for connecting and aligning the APIs enable the users to create composite applications quickly, easily, and intuitively. The IFE and its GUI support a fine-grained access control. It is possible to define access policies to allow or restrict visibility of and/or access to certain GUI elements. In addition, the IFE supports multitenancy and grouping of integration flows into “Development Spaces”. The access to the dev...