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5 Reasons Why Prismatic Chose GraphQL for Our API

Prismatic is an integration platform used by B2B software companies to build reusable integration workflows and deploy customer-specific instances that handle each customer's unique configuration and credentials.

When we set out to create Prismatic, it was clear that we needed an API for our web app and CLI to use. Additionally, we wanted our developer users to be able to hit our API programmatically so they could manage customers and integrations as they saw fit. This presented a problem: different developers would naturally have different needs and use cases. It didn't make sense to craft a series of custom RESTful endpoints for each individual's needs. GraphQL was growing in popularity (for good reason!) and was an appropriate choice for us given our needs.

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Diving Deep Into Databases With Joe Karlsson

NoSQL databases are known to provide agility and flexibility when compared to traditional SQL databases. They can be scaled across a myriad of servers, making them well suited for working with large sets of data. This equips organizations with the ability to embrace big data, analytics projects, and further work their digital transformation efforts.

Joe Karlsson, a Developer Advocate at MongoDB joins David Brown in this episode as he shares his insights on NoSQL databases, relational databases, and how SQL and NoSQL, in some cases, cross each other’s boundaries.

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How to Use Protobuf With Apache Kafka and Schema Registry

Since Confluent Platform version 5.5, Avro is no longer the only schema in town. Protobuf and JSON schemas are now supported as first-class citizens in Confluent universe. But before I go on explaining how to use Protobuf with Kafka, let’s answer one often-asked question:

Why Do We Need Schemas?

When applications communicate through a pub-sub system, they exchange messages and those messages need to be understood and agreed upon by all the participants in the communication. Additionally, you would like to detect and prevent changes to the message format that would make messages unreadable for some of the participants. 

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Why API Schemas Are Better Than Connectors for Integration

Why Enterprise Application Integration Platforms Have Traditionally Used Connectors

A connector (often called an SDK) is a piece of code that wraps an external API so that it can communicate with your application. Huh? Ok, well, let’s run through a practical example.

Say you wanted to update a contact in your CRM system every time there was a change to the same contact in your ERP (or accounting system). The providers of both the CRM and ERP system document their APIs on their websites. This documentation describes all of the operations available in the API, the method by which you should connect to the API, security, and other settings.