Open Source Weblog

SnapLogic has two versions of its data integration framework – Community Edition 2.0 and Professional Edition 2.0. SnapLogic Community Edition 2.0 is available now, free of charge, and licensed under GPLv2; SnapLogic Professional Edition 2.0 is available under a commercial license which includes technical support.

When CBR caught up with SnapLogic CEO Chris Marino, he said that Dhillon founded the company after he realised that for many companies, what they needed was a relatively lightweight, economical solution to the integration challenge: “He [Dhillon] realised that there were situations where answers like Informatica were not being used because companies could not afford the training and technology – it would be like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer.”

“With SnapLogic’s ‘Really Simple Integration’ we’re bringing the benefits to data integration that RSS [really simple syndication] did for information,” says Marino.

The company’s approach apparently makes it possible to integrate data, create mashups and Rich Internet Applications (or RIAs) by accessing data sources through a simple URL that points to the data’s original location.

“We can help people traditionally at the edge of IT – business people – to move at the speed of developers,” says Marino. “Our approach with URLs means it can give access to, or enable the mashup of, sources as diverse as SEC filings, hosted assets like web pages on Yahoo or any other Web source.”

Access to other back-end sources is typically handled via Jython, the Java scripting language, or ODBC in the case of databases.

So what about the ability to integrate less common interfaces or proprietary sources? “We expect the open source community to build proprietary connectors,” says Marino.

There’s a full programmatic interface, this time using Python, for writing new components and customizing data integration ‘Pipelines’. And there are out-of-the-box connectors to sources like QuickBooks, salesforce.com, Oracle and Apache. Admittedly, the out-of-the-box connectors are thin on the ground today, but the company hopes the open source community will help.

Of course companies could attempt to write their own connectivity to many of these sources, but as Marino says, SnapLogic takes care of all the necessary transformations, which do change as applications and data standards evolve.

Marino said the firm does not know (or won’t say) how many people are actively using the earlier versions of the software, but he conceded that the company has “zero paying customers” as it has only just announced the Professional edition that has a subscription element. He said there have been “thousands” of downloads of the free version.

A collection of free SnapLogic Components and ‘Pipelines’, and further info, is available at www.snaplogic.org.