Software AG Designer
Software AG Designer is an Eclipse-based graphical development tool you use to design and test services, the primary elements in applications integrations. A service is logic that performs a unit of work. For example, a service could post a purchase order received from a customer to an ordering system, or perform a credit check for a loan application. You can develop these types of services:
Simple services that perform one unit of work.
Aggregate services, in which services call other services (for example, to propagate data from one resource to several other resources).
Composite services, in which a service is wrapped around multiple simple or aggregate services that execute in sequential order (for example, to compose a report by gathering data from one resource after another). The wrapper service manages the flow of data from service to service.
You develop services in the Software AG Designer Service Development perspective, using Software AG Flow language or other languages such as Java. When working in Software AG Designer, you are always connected to an Integration Server; Software AG Designer builds and edits services directly on the Integration Server. Integration Server comes with a library of built-in services that you can use in your application integrations, and executes your services at run time.
Service development is an iterative process of building, testing, and correcting (debugging) your code. Software AG Designer provides a range of tools to assist you during the testing and debugging phases. You can test services with input values you specify manually, inspect the results, and investigate errors. You can merge differences between two Flow services or two document types. You can set up audit logging for services and documents. Software AG Designer also offers a Unit Test Framework perspective that enables you to do the following:
Design, build, and execute unit tests.
Mock services. You can have a test case execute a mocked service using input values you specify, invoke an intermediary service instead of the mocked service, replace the output of the mocked service with a specified exception, or use a custom Java class to implement the mocked service.
Perform regression testing. You can save test cases, along with their inputs and outputs, in XML files, and then rerun these reusable artifacts to make sure your latest changes do not re-introduce errors that were fixed in earlier versions.
Compare differences between flow services, doc types, JMS triggers, and adapter services and connections using visual compare and merge functionality.
Note: | You can also execute the unit tests externally using Ant scripts. |
Multiple Software AG Designer users can collaborate on an application integration, developing different pieces of the application integration and then deploying the pieces to a single Integration Server for testing. Software AG Designer enables you to lock objects you are working with, and can interact with a third-party version control system (VCS) repository.
Another tool for collaboration is CentraSite, which operates as a shared database of metadata about assets that are stored in Software AG Designer, Integration Server, and CentraSite. Application integration developers can publish services and document types from Software AG Designer to CentraSite, and can drag and drop these assets from CentraSite into Software AG Designer. You can incorporate web services from CentraSite (and other SOA registries) into application integrations you build in Software AG Designer. Conversely, Software AG Designer can create web services from services that reside on Integration Server and can register the web services with CentraSite (and other SOA registries).
