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Hey!
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Hey, hey!
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Hey, alright! Hey, everybody!
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Do me a favor, raise your hand if you like working with legacy code.
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Alright, well you guys are missing out! Legacy code is awesome! It tells us everything not to do, and if it wasn't for that, we'd go and repeat some of those mistakes.
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So, I'm Jeffrey Matthias, I'm an engineer with SRID, and I'm going to talk to you about future-proofing your third-party integrations.
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This is a collection of practices. I'm not going to claim they’re the best practices, but they've been working really well for us, and that's why I put them together to share.
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My team's job, as Tim just mentioned a minute ago, is to work from a monolithic Rails app and split that out.
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We have a similar situation at SRID; we have a pretty fast-growing company with a monolithic PHP app. That is awesome, because it means it gives me a job.
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One of our core responsibilities is extracting our third-party services from being spaghetti dependencies into a manageable pattern.
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We can repeat this process and we use Rails to do it, but the stuff I’ll be talking about today applies to any Ruby application.
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Many of the patterns I’ll show today come from our work with Pivotal Labs about nine months to a year ago, and we’ve built on top of that.
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When we're looking at a third-party integration, we have a few main goals to manage that interaction.
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The first one is to keep third-party logic out of our code. I probably don’t need to make a case to you about that.
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As soon as somebody else’s implementation starts influencing the way you write your code or even think about things, you start becoming dependent on their implementation. It's scary!
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The next aspect is making our third-party behavior predictable, and we do that by test-driving our code.
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The last point is making our third-party interactions replaceable.
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As an engineer at SRID, I'm fully aware that I'm telling you to make my company's product replaceable, and I firmly believe that any third-party API you use should be.
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Let’s take a look back. I actually have a degree in art—I can prove it! I have an amazing drawing here.
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My professors would be so proud! This is a general look at what the architecture looks like.
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The 'Music Box' app obviously doesn’t have anything called 'Music Box' nor do we have a 'My Little Teapot' third-party service.
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The most important thing to understand is that there's this adapter sitting in the middle, and we have the internet, or something.
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This doesn't just apply when I say third-party integrations; I'm not just talking about outside your company.
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Anytime you're engaging—since we’re all moving to Service Oriented Architecture, breaking things up—you need to assess the dependencies on your logic.
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How intertwined are your actual dependencies with your own internal applications?
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For example, we currently have a database abstraction at SRID that people like or don’t like, but the point is we're applying this pattern for our internal service too.
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Someday, someone might agree or disagree with us and not like that service enough to replace it, so we want to ensure flexibility.
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This 'Teapot Adapter' is designed for our third-party service. The key aspect is that it's just a Ruby gem.
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By using 'bundle gem teapot_adapter,' you create and bootstrap a gem for us.
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When you do that, you don’t need to push it anywhere; keep it in your repository and specify the path for your gem file.
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I hope most of you have already been using this to organize your code.
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This provides a very clear separation line for our concerns, allowing the SRID logic to remain in the application while third-party logic resides in the adapter.
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All you need to focus on is the messages exchanged in between.
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That said, don't ignore third-party SDKs that provide libraries for you to utilize their services. They have put in hard work, and you should leverage that.
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I'm not suggesting you reinvent the wheel by rolling your own gem, but the messages passing into this adapter should be in your own language.
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The implementation should utilize any existing code. Your adapter gem can still use the SDK or gem from the third party or anyone else.
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Let’s go back and look at this architecture again. It’s really just a basic architecture composed of service objects.
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Your messages are routed to these service objects, which then call out to the third party, returning appropriate objects.
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One of the most crucial aspects of setting up this architecture is ensuring that your main application doesn’t know what adapter it’s using.
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It knows how to communicate with the adapter, but doesn’t know which one to use.
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The only place you should see the name of that adapter is in some initializer.
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This reflects our current version of a Rails initializer, and the bottom lines show where we hand over the service name.
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That should be the only instance within your entire application where references to that adapter are made.
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Once that’s established, we use a configuration class to refer to our services by the configuration instance.
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For those unfamiliar, this denotes the use of a Singleton pattern, which is one of the few places I would recommend it.
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Again, I want to emphasize that this is the only place in the application where the 'Teapot' should appear in your 'Music Box' app code.
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How do you begin moving toward this standard?
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First, clearly define your internal vocabulary. This could not have followed a better talk than Mike’s discussion on understanding your domain and concerns.
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We need to know how we regard our business structure and avoid focusing on that third-party service.
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This means getting everyone to agree on terminology. It often seems obvious, but when talking with business owners, product owners, or stakeholders, it's crucial to ensure they are on the same page.
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You'll find variances often; getting consensus sets the vocabulary for messaging between your application and the adapter.
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Even if you never intend to replace a third-party service—first off, you should always plan to replace third-party services—you should maintain your own language.
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Ensure how you articulate things is relevant to your company and distinct from the third party.
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For instance, from our perspective, when we mention a package, our third-party provider relates to it as a product rate plan.
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When referring to add-ons, they talk about a product rate plan as well.
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A coupon is referred to as a product rate plan charge by the third party.
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This differentiation simplifies conversations with our teams.
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We can reference packages, add-ons, and coupons very clearly, while those who must deal with the third-party service should understand the details.”},{
