Simpler third-party integrations

I would like to tell how I have done the third-party service integrations on my side project. Email, file storage, error logging are a few examples.

For every integration there is a wrapper module which contains the nitty-gritty details of the service integration, and exports one or more functions that represent the basic operations that the wrapped integrated service provides:

• EmailUtils exports sendEmail;
• FileStorage exports storeFile and deleteStoredFile;
• ErrorLogging exports logError and errorLoggingMiddleware;

This setup allows me to easily stub the third-party service in unit tests and keep the app code unaware of the details of specific services.

This is a pretty neat arrangement actually, and because of that I like to push the idea of what a third-party service is: How about wrapping the Markdown parsing? How about wrapping the DB?

I have a Markdown module that exports the parseMarkdown function. Now I can use that function and my app will never know what specific Markdown parsing library I use. This makes it easy to change it later if needed.

I have a Db module that exports the runQuery, and now the app doesn’t need to be concerned with any specifics of the API of the particular SQL library. ORM? Promise-based API? Callback-based API? — The wrapper module contains all of that so that the app code can be straightforward.

Containing the third-party service integration complexity into a wrapper module also allows me to unit test that service separately. I chose my tests to interact with the real service; it can be slow, but this gives me the peace of mind that automated tests are expected to give. To work around their slowness, I only run them once from the Git pre-commit hook, with the exception of the time when I work on them specifically.

How about wrapping the app server? — I can do that too. I have separated the code that deals with the request-response life-cycle in a separate module Adapter and this allows me to have the backend code as plain functions that receive values and return values.

What I like best about this setup is that it allows me to keep the different subsystems unentangled, and so, manageable.

Happy integrating!