Json and REST in the BizTalk World

Editor's Notes

• #3: Introduction
• #6: Reason I wanted to do this talk the change that I am experiencing with projects I am involved with at customers. I myself see in my current projects more demands for REST based services and requirement for JSON. World has changed with cloud and devices. We need to connect to more systems, applications and services than before. Data is pushed around in unthinkable amount of bytes. And data will become more distributed. Not every bit of data is going to end up in the cloud. Some is too sensitive or intrusive to be placed in the cloud. Therefore, data becomes fragmented and resides on many places. This will enhance the demand for integration. In combination with need for connectivity. The SOAP/XML world most of us integration people know very well has been taken over by REST and JSON. More enterprises are offering mobile apps for their services like insurance companies, energy providers, banking, and etcetera.
• #7: Change. I have done talks in the past like the first episode of the BizTalk Summit here in London back in 2013 on adapters in 2013 that support integration with Microsoft Azure i.e. relay, sb-messaging and web-http. Next year about BizTalk Service i.e. Microsoft Azure BizTalk Services, which are now going to be App service. Today I will talk about what you can do with the current BizTalk Server 2013 R2 platform. I am currently working on various projects in the Netherlands that leverages BizTalk Server 2013 R2 and require connectivity with Microsoft Azure and back end systems. Topics will be scenario’s that involve BizTalk Server 2013 R2 platform.
• #8: We are seeing change
• #9: On premise and cloud have collided and hybrid is the new magic word. We BizTalk professionals in Microsoft space are in the middle. We have to connect both world, hence create hybrid connections. BizTalk offers various connectivity options with regards to cloud. It supports Microsoft Azure services like service bus with sb proprietary protocol, relay, Microsoft Azure SQL Database, storage, and API that have a REST implementation and even JSON format now with BizTalk Server 2013 R2. You can expect to build a new of solution if not already doing so. Question to the audience: Who’s currently working on a solution that involves connectivity with the cloud/Azure i.e. is building a hybrid solution?
• #10: What does modern integration look like or is going to look like. BizTalk can play a role in exposing backend data to front end i.e. web site hosted in Azure. Think about populating an operation data store that web sites and/or mobile application use to provide end users with information like how is your energy consumption over last month, year, financial data how your investments are going, how much money you have spent on health care, and so on. This is kind of near real time scenarios, you can also create low-latency solution leveraging only the adapter pack/sdk to build services that expose data in your back end systems like SAP, Oracle eBusiness Suite or Siebel. Since REST/JSON is required in many cases these days, the platform offers WCF-WebHttp and JSON support. Later introduced with 2013 R2. This is step forward to evolve BizTalk Server into the new world I would say. BizTalk can consume RESTFul endpoints that respond with JSON messages.
• #11: Integration from a BizTalk Perspective
• #12: SLide
• #13: REST Came about in 2000 doctoral dissertation of Roy Fielding – but it’s been used for much longer. JSON is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language, Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition - December 1999. JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language. Ingredients for hybrid solution and what you face is REST architecture, JSON, WCF, …
• #14: First demo/scenario is one I have built quite some time ago and shows how to consume a RESTful endpoint and handle the JSON response. I have added ETW in this demo to show what happen behind the scenes with the response.
• #15: Second demo/scenario is one where BizTalk Server 2013 R2 plays a role in communicating with a cloud api. This is the lastfm api. Lastfm is a …
• #16: What you have just seen was a small demonstration of the new capability in BizTalk Server 2013 R2 with WCF-WebHttp and JSON. This shows that you can communicate with any kind of current REST endpoints (API) out there on the internet, since most of them are REST bases and use JSON format. Challenges you will face are security, how can you going to deal with OAuth or other security mechanism, you probably end up have custom behaviors or pipeline components. An example is next demo where you have to provide an API key to be able to call API operations of LastFM API.
• #17: DEMO
• #18: You have just seen a more … Other mechanism of tools can be used to achieve this.
• #19: Recap