Learn how to implement use cases involving many of the components of Software AG’s Digital Business Platform (DBP). This series of short videos shows how to leverage the DBP capabilities to solve some typical business and technical challenges.
| Issue 3, 2018 |  Download PDF |
In the software industry, programmers often learn a new language by starting with the simplest-possible application—like printing out the words “Hello, World!” In the same spirit, the video series "Hello DBP" shows the simplest-possible, end-to-end scenario that covers many of the DBP capabilities. These developer-centric videos take one business or technical problem at a time, describe the way the DBP components work together to solve it, and then show a live demo with a six-minute timer to build as much of that implementation as possible.
Feel free to jump directly to the Hello DBP Playlist, or keep reading to find out more.
Watch "Hello DBP" anytime on www.softwareag.com
Introduction
The "Hello DBP" story centers on a fictitious company, ThingCo, which manufactures things, widgets and gadgets. They’ve been in business for a long time but recognize the need to provide a superb customer experience and react to market and competitive challenges in a timely and agile way. They have chosen Software AG’s DBP as a software stack for this purpose and are learning how to utilize these industry-leading capabilities as they roll out their latest product, the MegaThing XL, on a tight schedule set by the CEO.
Strategy and enterprise architecture using Alfabet
ThingCo’s Thing Division is rolling out their new MegaThing XL but the rest of the company is also busy with many projects and business goals. See how ThingCo uses Alfabet to track its business strategies and priorities and identify duplicate or complementary IT projects.
Sprint 1 – Cumulocity IoT trial
The MegaThing XL will generate a lot of measurements, and ThingCo wants to offer its customers complete access to dashboards and analytics. The CIO and developer use their first development sprint to assess the suitability of Cumulocity for managing the data from these things.
Sprint 2 – Cumulocity and webMethods Integration Server
This sprint shows how to register a new Thing with Cumulocity using the CloudStreams Connector for webMethods Integration Server, which wrap the REST API calls. It also simulates the collection of health statistics from things, again via the CloudStreams connector.
Sprint 3 – Integration Server and Terracotta DB
ThingCo requires a single and fast repository for its Thing information across all applications of its business. This sprint shows the use Terracotta DB as an in-memory master store for Thing metadata using the Terracotta DB adapter for Integration Server.
Sprint 4 – Integration Server REST Services
In the previous sprints, we built some re-usable services for lifecycle operations on Things: create, read, update and delete. Now see how easy it is to turn these into REST APIs available for use across ThingCo’s IT projects.
Sprint 5 – Integration Server and webMethods API Gateway
ThingCo wants to make these APIs available to developers in their customers’ organizations, so they can build their own layered applications. API Gateway can do this with no custom coding, including sophisticated security protocols. This sprint walks through those steps.
Sprint 6 – API Gateway and webMethods API Portal
It’s great to have APIs available to third-party developers, but how does ThingCo share the API definitions and documentation, along with an easy way to play with those APIs? This sprint shows how easy it is to API Portal for these capabilities.
Sprint 7 – Integration Server and Digital Event Services
ThingCo’s target architecture includes notifications of key process milestones like the creation or deletion of a Thing. In other words, they want an event-driven architecture. Digital Event Services (DES), a built-in feature of the DBP, is perfect for ThingCo’s needs and makes it seamless and simple to send or receive events from the different components. This sprint shows how easy it is to emit digital events using the existing Integration Server messaging infrastructure and Software AG Universal Messaging.
Sprint 8 – DES and event persistance
ThingCo must adhere to strict government regulations with respect to activities involving certain Things and that implies keeping an audit trail of digital events for Things. The open source ElasticSearch® engine is a low-cost repository for long- term storage of Thing events and digital event persistence makes it easy to store events to or retrieve events from ElasticSearch or Hadoop®.
Sprint 9 – DES and Apama
This sprint shows how to set up a simple Apama application to listen for changes in Thing health measurements (received as DES events), detect problematic patterns and emit a new digital event representing an alarm.
Sprint 10 – MashZone NextGen with DBP data feeds
ThingCo agents need to be able to see alerts plus real-time and historical data on Things. This is a perfect use case for MashZone NextGen dashboards with built-in data feeds to Terracotta DB, DES and event persistence.
Sprint 11 – IS and webMethods AgileApps
Through previous sprints, our "Hello DBP" application is generating events and alarms, and there is visibility via a dashboard. When a health alarm is raised, ThingCo would like to a simple ticketing system for technicians to log work and document progress during their investigation into the problematic Thing. Watch as we build such a ticketing system in minutes with no custom coding.
Sprint 12 – webMethods Dynamic Business Orchestrator and AgileApps
After implementing the simple ticketing system triggered by each health alarm, ThingCo realizes that there are many false alarms, and it is overkill to create a ticket each time. So the solution is
to build a small dynamic process application with a user task to triage the alarm and only if it looks like a critical alarm, create the ticket for the technician to look into it in more detail.
Summary and wrap up
The final video reviews the capabilities and architecture used by the "Hello DBP" application. It also shows off the latest marketing campaign for the MegaThing XL.
Try it yourself
Just like the simplest Hello World example does not teach a reader how to program a complete application, this "Hello DBP" video series is not a replacement for learning how to build out complex DBP applications. Nonetheless, we posted the underlying assets used by Hello DBP along with instructions for how to build it to this GitHub® repository: https://github.com/softwareag/hello-dbp. It does not cover the installation or configuration of the products since that is covered by official product documentation.
We are eager to hear if "Hello DBP" was helpful and how it can be improved or extended. Feel free to email us at Hello DBP@softwareag.com.