Over the past couple of years I’ve done a lot of work with orchestration layers – maybe that’s a bad term, but the general idea:
Some event happens -> Collect needed data -> Move data to a new system -> Do something
A thousand years (it feels like it) this fell under the umbrella of EAI – Enterprise Application Integration and there were a lot of players in the market. After doing a lot of this by hand with cron jobs, EDI, and other icky things I was exposed to a system called Crossworlds.
Crossworlds was like everything at the time and was eventually bought by IBM – but the gist is it was an orchestration layer that allowed disparate systems to talk to each other. From what I recall there was a server in the middle, and the Crossworlds developer would build connectors – so something happens in Oracle, and we want to update Siebel or whatever. We needed to capture the event, transform the data in a middle layer (tada! The Java Connector!) and shuttle the data to another system.
(Here is an interesting paper from the ACM on Enterprise Integration – circa 2003…)
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/606272.606273
The company I was working with at the time didn’t last long, and I moved on to other things – a J2EE/Weblogic/Websphere journey, some Microsoft stuff etc.
I didn’t think much about EAI again until it started to show up a little differently – this time as iPaaS (Internet Platform as a Service). In the last few years quite a few iPaaS providers have shown up and the pattern is largely the same.
- Find a triggering event – an app integration, a webhook, whatever
- Drag and drop your logic in a canvas
- Do something with the data
- Output somewhere – another system, Slack/Discord, or maybe the triggering system.
I’ve used a few of these over the last couple of years – Zapier, Workato, Zoho Flow as major examples. For each one of these, they were basically the same and differentiated by things like their connector library, could you build your own, could you make your own SDK (thanks Workato!), etc.
For what we were doing, and the company having a Zoho One subscription – ultimately it was easier and cheaper to run with Zoho Flow. It has its issues for sure, but it was effectively free with Zoho One. All was good (enough).
Until a friend suggested I look at n8n.
n8n is like these other systems but on steroids. The action types, the way workflows can be built, and the introduction of AI agents and any number of integrations, LLMs, etc you want to use make this really different.
So far I’ve only watched a few Udemy videos, some YouTube stuff – but I am excited to play with this. I plan to go through one more lab class on Udemy, then attack some of the million ideas I can think of with this kind of extension over other iPaaS tools.
If any of these projects go anywhere I’ll write about them here, but in the meantime take a look…