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Connector SDK: Building Integration Connectors Made Easy

· 3 min read
Bill Easton
Bill Easton
Software Senior Principal Engineer @Boomi

Connectors are the main components in Boomi Integration. If you use the Integration product and have built integration processes, you’ve used connectors to some extent. Connectors give your integrations life. They can pull data from cloud services, push data to local disks or repositories, or even listen to real-time events. This provides you with a set of tools, libraries and resources to build connectors to suit your needs.

Did you know?

You can develop your own connector with minimal effort and setup, and run your connector wherever you have a runtime or cloud attachment?

The connector you build can be uploaded to the Integration platform and immediately used anywhere you build processes; no permissions required. Connectors install themselves and have built-in deployment mechanisms that don’t require you to install anything into your runtimes. This makes the code you write for these connectors instantly portable to different environments, platforms and phases of development.

Creating a connector is easier than ever, and you can quickly get started given you have a light developer background in Java. You don’t have to download jars manually or install IDE plugins and for some connectors, you can build them with a simple text editor.

Connectors built with the Connector SDK give you a very accessible way to unlock various aspects of customizing what happens during an integration step in your process.

Some quick examples of things you can do in a custom connector:

  • Wrap Communication to an Internal API: Do you have an internal API that you’re using technology connectors to connect to? Using technology connectors can sometimes be cumbersome, why not instead write your own connector and operations to talk to your API and streamline communications using one of our frameworks like, REST, OpenAPI or SOAP to name a few.

  • Listener Applications

    • Scheduling: Write a listener that executes processes on a more complex schedule than what’s possible in Integration.

    • Polling: Poll an endpoint to see if there have been any changes to a specific set of endpoints to react in your downstream process(es).

  • Extend Capabilities of OSS Connectors: Boomi Connector Projects

To get started with the Connector SDK head over to our developer documentation.