“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
― J. Krishnamurti
Introduction
Microservices provide both a business centric and technology/architecture centric approach for developing software applications. They allow you to decouple or loosely couple the components/services connected using API services framework.
Zoho Creator a low code platform for custom application development leverages the microservices architecture which makes you to prepare independently deployable components owned by a small team. Any issues in the services can be easy to identify/fix and easy to redeploy as the processes can be very agile.
Use Case
Let us say you have to process the Insurance claims submitted by the customer which require to be screened, validated and finally processed by the teams of different skill set.
A customer portal for the customers to login and submit the claims, the operations team to validate the submitted claims and pass them to the Finance Team for processing and finally settlement of the claim amount to the customer. At the high level, we have UI component/Login Page in the portal, Zoho Creator workflows/business logic code, the e-Signing of documents where needed, the invoice generation and payment gateway to settle the claimed amount online.
Advantages of Zoho Creator
Zoho Creator helps in preparing the relevant forms/reports/workflows for the application to interact with customers and internal staff. In addition, with the OAUTH based authentication between the other Zoho suite of products via API help in smooth integration. In this case, you can completely prepare the relevant set of forms for Zoho Invoice to generate an invoice, prepare the templates or documents to be used for electronic Signature in Zoho Sign, the in built payment workflow helps in configuring the payment gateway like PayPal or Razorpay (India). In case of any other third party API to be used for any of these operations can be integrated to Zoho Creator via API with limited coding and in a highly secured manner.
Conclusion
Microservices a framework or architecture will help any business to make applications as loosely coupled components. This helps them in a long term to maintain and enhance the features quite easily with very little turnaround time. The choice of the Integration via API helps in choosing different products to evaluate and manage your cost/productivity in an efficient manner.