A recent client requested a review of their Cast Iron projects. The offshore Cast Iron development team only received minimal training, so there was some concern over the robustness of the orchestrations. Over the course of the one hour review, Rapid Integration discovered multiple logic errors, some sub-optimal design patterns, and most importantly the accidental use of shared variables.

Shared variables in Cast Iron are a means of ensuring the persistence of its value over the course of multiple jobs. E.g. they are great for session management. However, they automatically set the max jobs to one for that orchestration; Cast Iron does not tell you this, nor indicate this in the WMC. So, the orchestration we reviewed was supposed to scale horizontally and in reality was limited to one job at a time. We saved the client some serious headaches, because the offshore team had little chance of noticing this given their lack of product experience.

Give us a call for a project and architecture review.

Rapid Integration completed a project that uses saved searches in NetSuite to extract data into a tab-separated flat-file for loading into a popular predictive marketing tool. The project uses a combination of the NetSuite connector and the SFTP endpoint, and uses Loggly for error reporting.

Using the Cast Iron Management APIs, Rapid Integration developed a project that provides a REST API for managing your project deployment life-cycle. The REST API allows you to publish, deploy, undeploy, reconfigure, and remove a project from one or more appliances with a single API call. The project also allows you to check configuration properties across one or more appliances, check the status of a project, search for a property, and search the system or job logs.

The project can be customized for any customer's requirements. Contact us for more information.

Rapid Integration recently completed a six month project involving the migration of over twenty million records between two Salesforce.com organizations. The project used a combination of the Salesforce Bulk API and a Microsoft SQL Server database for staging. Using a Cast Iron horizontal scaling design pattern, we extracted the entire data set from Salesforce in 90 minutes. To make this all work, we learned a few new Salesforce API techniques, and we made some Cast Iron tweaks to improve the SOQL query performance.

A recent Cast Iron project involved taking tab-separated files and producing comma-separated files as a result. Seems easy enough? Of course... except three of the five use cases required merging multiple input files before producing the comma-separated output. Since merging files in memory is not a Cast Iron best practice, Rapid Integration used a MySQL database to stage the data. The database query activity allowed us to use SQL to aggregate, sort and dedupe the data so that Cast Iron could do what it does best.

Cast Iron does not like WSDLs that use SOAP encoding, so this project was a challenge. The input was a comma-separated file, and the output was a SOAP envelope containing the SOAP-encoded array of data required by the service we integrated. Given the nature of the array format, Rapid Integration decided that XSLT was the best option. So, the parsed flat-file becomes multiple parallel arrays in the SOAP envelope, and then we pass the result to the SOAP service. Since the documentation of the target endpoint was not very good, there was some trial and error over a day or so, but we got there in the end.