Iguana Translator Overview

Integration is more than simply creating channels and turning them on/off. As mentioned in previous sections, you also need to add instructions that control how the channels and their components handle incoming and outgoing data. This is where the magic happens: translations, transformations, and mappings are all handled with code hiding underneath the hood.

All coding happens in the Iguana Translator, a sophisticated development environment designed to get you up and running as fast as possible. We’ve designed the Translator so that you can develop the scripts you need even if you don’t have a lot of experience coding. We’ve included some powerful features (like real-time feedback and on-the-spot scripting help) to help you tackle interface solutions without getting tripped up by common roadblocks.

Introduction Video

This Iguana Tour video highlights four core features of the Translator: Auto-completion, annotations, sample data and source control. Learn about the thought process behind the Translator and discover how these features work together to create an innovative integration platform. Runtime: 13 minutes.

Why did we build the Translator?

When we designed the Translator, we were very much aware of the following issue:

  • Based on what we have observed in real life, real-world interfacing is always about putting a square peg into a round hole
  • Slightly incompatible data models usually requires string munching to make things work
  • Often there are business rules with “if/then” logic
  • The end result is that most real-world interfaces require a lot of scripting

Rather than pretending that a GUI can successfully perform this kind of logic, we decided to create a visual scripting environment specifically tailored to middleware interfaces.

The Iguana Translator makes scripting visual, but it differs from traditional IDEs that were designed for general purpose development, like Eclipse or Visual Studio. Why? Because interface programs are essentially very fast batch programs: ‘data in’ transforms into ‘data out’ in a fraction of a second.

This simple observation allowed us to build the Translator in a unique way, so that:

  1. Every time you change the code or the sample data being processed, the code is recompiled and the program is run from start to finish (using new data, if there were changes).
  2. During execution, we collect data from the debug APIs and use it to display detailed annotations next to the code, showing exactly how the data is being processed.

This was our first major innovation when we introduced the Translator. Since then, we’ve included other useful features: Seamless, integrated source code control, simple and consistent APIs, and a strict policy that limits the features in the product.

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