As part of the series of product updates on AgilePoint NX v9.0 release, the next one I would like to share is Apache Kafka. Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform developed by the Apache Software Foundation. It was created to handle high-throughput, fault-tolerant, and scalable real-time data streaming applications. It is highly popular with the developer’s community because of its highly scalable architecture.
At its core, it is a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system that allows different applications or systems to communicate with each other through the exchange of messages. At the same time, at its core, it is also a distributed log, so it can gather the events in this log in a distributed, replicated, scalable, fault tolerant and persistent way.
AgilePoint NX V9 provides the following integrations:
- An AgileConnector: This acts as a process initiator-consumer, meaning it will subscribe to topic events and upon receiving an event will trigger a process instance.
- A set of Process Activities: These allow publish and subscribe event to and from topics as part of process model.
With this integration one can design apps leveraging the best of workflow and event driven architecture. AgilePoint server instance can connect to Kafka running locally or in cloud. We recommend using Kafka version 3.4 and above.
Following is the recipe for this demo:
- Understand the connector configuration and options.
- Review the process activities, read event and publish event.
- And lastly, we’ll see it in action using a simple e-commerce demo app.
Note: Please note that this video is recorded while this feature is in beta version. Some of the labels and icons might change by the time it goes GA but the general concept of configuring these activities would remain the same.