Logic Apps review (UI and Mediation) Part 1

After a while I’m back into Logic Apps, a customer asked me to have a look about the possibilities to use Logic Apps in a very interesting scenario.
The customer is currently using BizTalk Server in conjunction with Azure Service Bus and a quite important Java integration layer.
This is not a usual POC (Proof of Concept), in this specific case I really need to understand about the actual capabilities provided by Logic Apps in order to cover all the requirements, the customer is thinking to move and migrate part of the on premises processing into the cloud.
A migration or refactoring is normally to be considered an important operation which involves many critical aspects like , productivity, costs, performances, pros and cons, risks and important investments.

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Logic Apps Review (Usability and Extensibility)

I started have a look into the new Logic App version and I have been focused in all of these factors without losing the customer objectives.

The first look accessing to the main Logic Apps portal is a clear and very well organized view, a quick tutorial shows how to create a very simple flow and the main page is organized into main categories.

Very intuitive approach is the possibility to start with the common triggers, very interesting will be the possibility to customize this area per developer profile, I’m sure the team is already working around that.
I selected one of the most used, an HTTP endpoint into the cloud in order to consume a process workflow.

Very good impression is the responsive time, a lot faster and all the new features in the UI as well.

The top down approach is very intuitive as it follows the natural approach used for a natural workflow development and the one-click New Step offers a fast way to add new components very quickly.
What I normally like to consider when I look to a technology stack are the small details which are able to tell me a lot of important things, for instance, selecting the New
Step box and switching from the designer to the code view, the UI maintains exactly the status in the selection, considering that I’m using a Web UI this is a very appreciated behaviour.
Looking in the New Step box is clear that the Logic App team is following the BizTalk Server orchestration pattern approach, I like that because this provides the same developer experience used in BizTalk, in that case I don’t need to explain to the developers how to approach to a Logic Apps flow as they already know the meaning of each step and the using.

You can download the entire article as a PDF document.
Logic Apps Review (Usability and Extensibility)

In term of mediation the approach used by Logic Apps is, what I’d like to call, Fast Consuming Mediation, essentially the process includes the mediation and it provides a fast approach to do that.
This is a different from BizTalk Server where the mediation is completely abstracted from the process, in the case of Logic Apps I see some very good points for using a fast mediation approach.
Logic Apps uses a concept of fast consuming, the approach to create a new mediation endpoint is very RAD oriented.
All the most important settings you needs to create a mediation endpoint are immediately accessible, fast and easy, the HTTP action is a very good example, we just add the action and it creates a new HTTP endpoint automatically, very fast and productive approach, fast consuming.

All people know how much is important for me the productivity, very appreciated is the search box in all the Logic Apps lists features.

Very appreciated the quick feature bar on the left with all the most important tasks and with the search box as well.

 

Following the quick tutorial, I created a HTTP endpoint and I added a new action, I decided to add the Office 365 Email and just try to send the HTTP content to an email account.

Each option provides a fast-dynamic parameter content which proposes all the public properties exposed by the previous step, this is very useful and fast and it shows the most important options, this is good to speed up the development.

Just saved the flow and it creates the URL POST to use, I tried to send a message using SOAPUI and it works perfectly

If you are interested about the SOAPUI project, just add a new REST project, put the URL created by the Logic Apps flow, set POST, media type Text/xml, write any message and send, you will receive a 202 response.

Check your inbox.

I’m definitely happy about the result, I created an HTTP endpoint able to ingest a post message and send an email in less than 2 minutes, quite impressive honestly.

You can download the entire article as a PDF document.
Logic Apps Review (Usability and Extensibility)

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