Frends roadmap

The Business User UI is an entirely new Frends feature, where a second simplified user interface of Frends is deployed alongside the existing main Frends user interface.

The goal of the Business User UI is to enable a no-code business user experience to discover pre-built integration flows from a library of templates, configure those integration flows, and to take them into use in the underlining main Frends tenant.

 The Business User UI capitalizes on the established Frends Templates feature, facilitating its use for business users.

 Additionally, the Business User UI can be utilized to offer an embedded iPaaS experience for ISV/SaaS partners of Frends. This is achieved by developing a designated number of templates that connect to their solutions or offering value-added services to their end customers through Frends.

The Business User UI will support the following use cases and functionalities:

• Business User onboarding and registration
  • Utilize an identity management system chosen by the customer
• Existing integration discoverability
  • See and search for integration and API templates published for usage in the Business User UI
• Business User organization and user management
  • Configure template visibility and usage based on user roles
  • Create and manage organizations and user groups within the Business User UI
• Integration monitoring
  • Provide business users with simplified monitoring tools and reports to keep track of the integrations in use
• White-labeling
  • Enable customers and partners to to make lightweight white-label customization such as altering fonts, colors, logos, etc.

A completely new Frends web application that is deployed alongside the main Frends User Interface that is meant to provide a unified API Developer on-boarding and discoverability experience to both internal and external API consumers.

The API portal will support the following use cases and features:

• API Consumer registration and on-boarding
  • Utilizing an identity management system chosen by the customer
• API Products
  • Create and manage API Products in the API Portal that are available to be consumed by the API users
  • API Products are a combination of existing API’s either directly in Frends or managed as passthrough API’s using the Frends Passthrough API Management functionality
• API Discoverability
  • Publish API Products you have configured using the API Portal
• Lightweight CMS
  • Create API marketing and help content using markdown to publish on the API Portal
• Whitelabeling
  • Enable customers and partners to provide lightweight whitelabelling customizations to change for eg. fonts, colors, logos and so on.

A new Frends feature to incorporate Azure Open AI GPT 4.0 model as a NLP interface to Frends.

The goal of the feature is to allow developers to use natural language to boost developer productivity via. answers provided by the GPT algorithm that is trained to work within the context of Frends.

Frends GPT will initially have the following features:

• A new GPT chat tab in the process editor view
  • Answer any integration and Frends related questions
  • Generate Frends compatible C# code based on prompts by the developer
  • Generate Frends mapping configuration and messages to systems known by GPT

An extension to current Frends functionality which allows multiple Frends processes to be chained together in the same process definition by configuring an identification or correlation variables that links the independent process parts together.

An example long-running process functional description:

Process Part 1:

• Triggered with a schedule
• Retrieve a file from an SFTP server
• Write file to a local folder
• Save OrderID to be the correlation ID of the long-running process
• OrderID is parsed from the file name transferred with the SFTP transfer

Process Part 2:

• Establish a file trigger that looks for a fille with the same OrderID present in a different folder
• Read in the new file and transfer it to a separate SFTP server

Any amount of time can pass between Process Parts 1 and 2.

The API Management 2.0 is a set of improvements to existing Frends API Management capabilities to enable new use cases, streamline the authentication and authorization capabilities of Frends API Management and to prepare for the release of the Frends API Portal.

Features and improvements in API Management 2.0 are:

• Passthrough API functionality to enable users to easily configure existing API’s to be governed by Frends API Management without having to have an underlining Frends process attached to the API.
  • The passthrough API will have simplified configuration capabilities to modify:
    • HTTP Headers
    • Authentication methods
    • URL paths and parts
• Reworked API Policy authoring to have a single unified mechanism to configure API Policies to limit access as well as configure throttling for API’s instead of separate tools for different methods.
  • This will replace existing API Keys and oAuth based authentication by introducing API Policies as a new feature
  • API Policies will be used to configure throttling and access to any API governed by Frends API Management
  • These API Policies can then be applied to any type of an API Consumer regardless of the authentication method used
• New authentication method: Private Application Registration
  • Private Application Registrations are meant to replace API Keys as a more secure way of authentication
  • Private Application Registrations are in essence static JWT-tokens that contain arbitrary data provided by the user that contain relevant information about the API consumer as well as digital signatures to verify the integrity of the token
• Improved API Monitoring capabilities
  • Introduce new API Monitoring views to show more API relevant data such as HTTP response codes as well as better ways to view the overall API health and execution statistics

An extension to the current Unit Testing features of Frends which enables users to create, configure, save and manage integration test scenarios that are attached to a specific integration process.

From a practical perspective this would mean that the User can “paint” a section of an integration process and select to create a test scenario based on the selection by providing the needed variables and test messages as well as the end result assertion for the test scenario.

The E2E Integration Test Automation would include the following features:

• Select which parts of the process are to be utilized in the test scenario
• Provide values for needed variables within the selected scope of the test
• Attach an assertion mechanic in the end to determine if the test is successful or not
• Create multiple tests on the same process
• Attach descriptions and other metadata to the test scenarios
• Execute the tests manually or with automated rules
• View the test execution history and statistics

Extension to the previous Frends GPT feature, that will allow the content and answers produced by the GPT algorith to be directly integrated into the development experience in Frends.

From a practical perspective this means that if the first iteration of Frends GPT is capable of providing you with a working configuration of a restful API call, this feature will enable Frends to directly do the configuration for you into the process itself.

Additionally this will include support for most Frends tasks to be utilized in this way.

It would be nice to be able to download the source code and the Process package for a Process. This could be possibly added to the Process version history dialog

For monitoring Agent statuses automatically it would be nice to have an endpoint on the Management API to be able to query the status of Agents. The result could contain the following data:

• Agent name
• Last update
• Last status
• Last error

At the same time the event log could have a separate end point with the following data:

• ID
• Event hash (not sure if this is necessary)
• Agent name
• Level
• Message

Currently it is not possible to use asynchronous calls inside of code shapes due to us wrapping the code inside of an action. But if you would like to use an async method, e.g. await Task.Delay(1000), you can’t do that and have to block the thread, which is bad.

Currently if the Process has any async Tasks it is executed asynchronously, so we could add a similar feature to code shapes to mark them as async if they contain the await keyword

Having descriptions for Process variables makes them a lot easier to use them and would be pretty necessary when using them for Process Templates

There is a need for an Admin page where an admin could see relevant information about the status the platform.

Information that could be shown:

• Service Bus status
  • Queue lengths
• Database status
  • Size used/quota
• Logs
• Etc to be added

It would be nice if we had a public listing of Task EOL dates and some description/explanation. This could be refreshed daily for the and shown in the UI if you’re editing or creating a Process that is using a Task that has a known EOL.

It could be possible add information about Task deprecation to the Tasks portal, but that might not be as discoverable as in the