Hello @BryanK,
As far as I know, there are two ways to integrate with Netsuite -- either via HTTP APIs (SOAP and REST), which they call SuiteTalk, or via SuiteScript -- an embedded JavaScript scripting engine, not dissimilar to what ThingWorx provides for its scripting. I also haven't heard of any existing pre-packaged solutions for that.
The final choice largely depends on your requirements. Generally speaking, for pulling data from Netsuite you would typically call those SuiteTalk webservices from ThingWorx, while if you want to push some Netsuite events to ThingWorx, you would do it by calling ThingWorx REST services in SuiteScript via its "N/https" facility. Both approaches have their pros and cons and can be used in different situations. Consider the following questions:
- Do you plan to do "business logic" / data processing within Netsuite, or in ThingWorx?
- What is the nature of the data exchange -- is it unidirectional or bi-directional? Is it based on end-user request, or done on some regular time intervals?
- How much data do you need to transfer, and how frequently?
- Do you need near-realtime low-latency updates, or a batch job would suffice?
- What are your network security settings, i.e. is ThingWorx hosted behind a firewall?
- Do you have developers familiar with SuiteScript? And with ThingWorx scripting?
Generally speaking, pushing data from Netsuite to ThingWorx would probably be easier, mainly because of the super-simple AppKey-based authentication mechanism that the latter provides, but also because of the simplicity of ThingWorx REST APIs, data formats, etc.
Accessing Netsuite via SuiteTalk shouldn't be hard either, and the actual mechanism will depend on the functional scale of your use cases. For example, if you only need to query a shift roster every 24 hours, then simply calling its REST API from a ThingWorx service looks like an adequate solution. However, if you're going to do a complete synchronization of customers, orders, production sites, etc. -- then you might want to generate a SuiteTalk Java SDK based on WSDLs for SuiteTalk SOAP API and wrap it in a neat ThingWorx extension, which you can use extensively in your ThingWorx services.
Regards,
Constantine
