hotglue melt: 2023 Feature Roundup

Welcome to our year-in-review 2023 hotglue melt!

To those who’ve been around for a while, thank you for building your integrations on hotglue.

You make hotglue a better product with your feedback, and we’re always excited to see the creative ways you put hotglue to use.

As we begin the new year, we wanted to take a brief moment to look at how hotglue has changed over the last year. As always, feel free to reach out in Slack with your questions and suggestions for 2024!

2023 hotglue in summary 📋

Our integrations team built 83 open-source connectors. That included support for 61 net new SaaS and on-premise applications.

hotglue jobs are now much faster, thanks to a rebuilt runtime and deployment pipeline.

We added new modules across the admin panel, including the Jobs, Errors, White-Label, Connector Settings, and Environment Variables features.

Our new bi-directional flows make reading and writing data with your customers’ integrations dead-simple.

The hotglue team built a new Singer target SDK, making for simple, transparent exports to our most popular SaaS connectors.

Bi-directional flows ↔️

Before 2023, hotglue flows always consisted of a linked source and a linked target. This made for dead-simple setups when you only needed to move data in one direction.

However, bi-directional integrations where you need to consistently read and write data were not simple to set up in hotglue: you needed two separate flows with symlinked credentials.

Now, with hotglue bi-directional “V2” flows, this is supported out of the box. Rather than thinking about target flows, `linkedSources`, and `linkedTargets`, every integration that a customer links in a V2 flow is simply a connector.

Bi-directional flows come with a new set of “V2” endpoints. If you’re not already using V2 flows, you can try them out by creating a new flow, and leaving the “bi-directional” toggle turned on. Let us know if you want to discuss migrating your existing flows over!

New tools in your dashboard 🖥️

In 2023, we pushed some major updates to how you use the hotglue admin panel. You may have noticed the new jobs and errors panels, but there are other features spread through your dashboard that you may find useful:

• Connector Settingsallows you to define granular settings for your connectors, like the fields exposed in the widget, default config values, and the `install_uri` for custom git branches.
• Environment variables allow you to add additional variables for you to use in your ETL scripts on the fly, such as API URLs, flags, and keys.
• The Jobs panel lets you run fine-grained searches for jobs.
• The Errors panel gives you an overview of the most common errors affecting your tenants.
• The Tenant Drawer allows you to view and edit settings for your tenant, including the `tenant-config`, tenant metadata like org names, job schedules, and job history.
• White-label settings lets you customize the OAuth page, including your callback URI, logos, background colors, and loading text.
• We also added a host of environment settings, including more options for job failure recovery and Slack and Heap job monitoring.

Faster jobs: a new job executor and connector deployment pipeline 🕐

Last year, we frequently heard that you wanted jobs to kick off and run faster. We rebuilt our job runtime from the ground up with that in mind. The new version of the executor has two main benefits:

1. Faster builds for discovers and jobs - Jobs and discovers spend 60% less time queuing up, which means less time stuck in JOB_STARTED.
2. More flexibility with python versions - Our V3 executor defaults to Python 3.10. This is now much more customizable if you have specific version requirements.

We also re-designed our connector deployments using Jenkins, which removes dependency installation from the job runtime.

You can check which executor your jobs use by parsing your job status webhooks. If the `task_definition.id` shows `hotglue-executor-v3`, you’re using our modernized architecture!

Hotglue’s new SDK for writing Singer targets 🎯

The main challenge with using Singer targets has historically been understanding which records were created, and where validations happened. Traditional Singer targets either succeed (data probably loaded in) or fail (some data may have been loaded in, but not all of it). Hotglue’s new target SDK is designed to fix this.

The root concept in Hotglue’s target SDK is the `target_state`. The target state contains important data about what the target did, including:

• How many records were created, updated, or failed to load
• The success or failure codes for each record, and the new `id` from the target system, if returned.
• Failure messages for records that didn’t go through

In 2023, we built or upgraded 32 targets using hotglue’s target SDK. If you’re using a target that isn’t on this list yet, let us know! It may already be in our pipeline:

• Quickbooks
• Freshbooks
• Salesforce
• API
• Zoho Inventory
• Sendgrid
• Jira
• Salesforce Commerce
• Lob
• Montapacking v2
• Exact
• Picqer
• Xero v3
• Etsy
• Squarespace
• Constantcontact
• Aturian
• Odoo v3
• Sage300
• Dynamics Onprem
• Brevo
• Magento v2
• Keap
• Shipbob
• Dynamics BC Onprem
• Brikl
• BigCommerce
• Restaurant365
• Zendesk
• Zohobooks v2
• Precoro

Widget improvements 🔧

If you’re not using the widget or not using many widget features, you may have missed the updates we’ve been shipping all year: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@hotglue/widget?activeTab=versions

Note for React users: At the time of writing, the current version of @hotglue/widget is v1.4.46. You may need to update your widget version to access some of these features.

• Subtenants are now native to the widget, which you can enable in your widget settings. When turned on, your users can link multiple instances of the same integration.
• Your custom field mappingpage has a host of new features, including required tables and fields, multiple mappings per table, and localization.
• For those looking for a more custom workflow in the widget, we’ve added many new listeners, filters, and nextStep workflow actions across the widget.
• You can also now define more widget and connection behavior by passing values directly in your frontend code, including tenant metadata, dynamic OAuth parameters, and localization text.

New connectors 🔁

We added 61 new integrations in 2023, including 11 brand new bi-directional integrations, 29 new taps, and 21 new targets. We also rebuilt many of our most well-used connectors, which are not listed below.

Accounting and Inventory:

• Abra (tap)
• Dynamics NAV on-premise (Bi-directional)
• Dynamics BC on-premise (Bi-directional)
• Exact (target)
• Invoiced (tap)
• Katana (tap)
• Microsoft Dynamics BC (target)
• Nexar (tap)
• Precoro (Bi-directional)
• PropX (tap)
• Quickbooks Desktop (target)
• Restaurant 365 (Bi-directional)
• Sage 300 (Bi-directional)
• Sage 50 UK (target)
• Zoho Inventory (Bi-directional)

E-commerce and Order Management:

• Amazon Vendor Central (tap)
• BigCommerce (target)
• Bol (tap)
• Brikl (Bi-directional)
• Etsy (Bi-directional)
• Marketplacer (Bi-directional)
• Picqer (Bi-directional)
• QLS (Bi-directional)
• Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Bi-directional)
• Shiphero (tap)
• Shipbob (target)
• Squarespace (Bi-directional)
• Square (target)
• Storyous (tap)
• Toast (tap)
• Wix (target)

CRM and Email:

• Affinity (tap)
• Blackbaud (target)
• Brevo (target)
• Campaign Monitor (target)
• Constant Contact (target)
• GoHighLevel (tap)
• Keap (target)
• Klaviyo (target)
• Pipedrive (target)
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud (tap)
• Salesloft (tap)
• Sendgrid (target)

Database and Data Storage:

• Databox (target)
• Google Cloud SQL (Postgres) (Bi-directional)
• Microsoft Excel (tap)
• Microsoft SQL (tap)
• PowerBI (target)
• Redshift (target)

Support and Project Management:

• Clickup (target)
• Gladly (tap)
• Gong (target)
• Jira (target)
• Livechat (tap)
• Monday.com (tap)
• Stella Connect (tap)
• Zendesk (target)
• Zendesk Chat (tap)

Other Integrations:

• Apple App Store (tap)
• Azure Active Directory (tap)
• Chargify (tap)
• Jotform (tap)
• Trustpilot (tap)

Next up 📈

Thanks so much for reading! These are some things we have coming up:

• Real-time data posting that enables instant data syncing
• A brand new ETL experience in the admin panel
• Faster performance across the product
• Big updates to hotglue's on-premise connectors

Got ideas? Shoot us a message in Slack or send us suggestions at hello@hotglue.xyz.

See you next month! 👋