My Second PI project
For my second process BTP cloud integration project, I walked in the door confident I was going to crush it. I was recently certified and knew the all the ins and outs of from my first project. I was fortunate enough to get humbled immediately. I entered onto a team of absolute rock stars, some of whom had authored books, and I quickly learned how much I didn’t know. I was fortunate that the more senior people took the time to fill in the gaps and show me better ways of doing PI development than what I had been exposed to. (Back in the dark ages when you secret transaction codes and keystrokes to get to secret menus in PI.) I got a hands-on, practical education, and it made me start identifying this as a calling instead of as a job.
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History is Circular
On my first HCI project (which is the Neo version of what is now CI), I built a lot of interfaces, but I ended up walking away with a negative view of the platform because message mappings were grueling and it felt like the system was unreliable. I used a notepad as an IDE to write XSLTs and create XSDs for my sender and target messages, which was just miserable. Everything worked, but in hindsight it may not have been entirely the system; I see now that my flows were overly complex with lots of redundant checks and I thought the monitor was useless. I walked away thinking, "what kind of a madman would prefer this tool over PO?" uncertain that this would ever catch on.
I did another PO project and then went to my second CI project. I learned a lot and eventually, I became the madman. Like with PI many years earlier, a more seasoned consultant took the time to show me aspects of CI that I was missing in my education and voila! The pieces fit. On my new project I had exposure to the BTP platform as a whole, which showed me more of the robust capabilities than just HCI on Neo. There were better training materials available for free via learning journeys, and both SAP and the SDN had time for the community to catch up to answer some of the issues I had danced around on my first CI project. CI had become more mature, capable, and reliable in the short amount of time I was working on PO. On this new project with my mentor’s guidance, I became a big fan of groovy, and instead of being my last resort, it became something a first choice. We also used OData API to build custom utilities, as well as API management for usecases where CI wasn’t needed. We investigated FIGAF and CPI helper, and oh my goodness, I no longer had to leave the flow to turn on trace and could easily maintain the development. What an improvement! The platform changed into something that was more flexible and capable than PO ever had, but my PO experience had actually put blinders on me, so I was doing things the old PO way instead of the way they should be done on this new platform.
Long story Short (Too Late!)
When you have spent the time to learn something, there is a reluctance to go away from what you know. CI is a platform that can reward you for trying things and learning from your mistakes. The rigid classical approaches from PO are backwards compatible, but are often no longer best. What I can do in groovy is something I was never able to do in a message mapping on PO. What would be a time intensive development using a BPM on PO is now something I can do quickly and effectively on CI. The product has matured, and its amazingly capable if you know how to use it. Which we at HI do! In fact, many of the team members here come from that second project, over 15 years ago, and continue to bring with them a desire to share and help.
Say HI to BTP Cloud Integration
To avoid some of the trial and error needed to learn CI and BTP, I recommend you reach out to Happy Integrations at our website www.happyintegrations.work or email info@happyintegrations.work. Our resources have decades of experience on PO and BTP, we are happy to teach our customers and provide proven patterns for integration so they too can have easy to support and implement integrations. We can help you not only migrate to CI, but have patterns that will make your technical team and business happy.