Modelon Solutions

For one of my startups, we have been spending a little time trying to figure out how to perform integration with all of the different systems out there.

Some people use gmail, some people use outlook.com, and others use yahoo. there are a lot of different people out there and as a startup, it becomes impossible to cater to everbody.

Traditional software architecture would say to build a plugin system, and have different plugins to integrate with different systems. Using interfaces or messages, the plugin can react to different events and perform some additional work.

This same approach can be used in a web site, but as you scale up, it becomes harder and harder to keep the plugins happy and as a startup, and let’s face it, we don’t have the time to write all of the different plugins.

This said, our choice was to build the twenty percent of the plugins that eighty percent of the people are expecting. The rest would be catered to by exposing a rest endpoint to our system and publishing some metadata to rest automation websites.

Now you must be asking, how do rest automation systems work. They basically allow users to write small scripts, that execute on a timer and alter data.

For example. Here could be a small script that runs everyday at midnight.

Fetch all of my calendar items from my Hotmail account.
For reach item, if the item is marked as urgent,
         add an entry to my todo list at work.

Here is a list of a few of the different rest automations systems out there:

• If this then that
• Zapier