What are the best ways to integrate third-party components into an application?

Best practices for integrating third-party components into an application: 1) Research and evaluate components. 2) Study documentation and APIs. 3) Manage versioning and dependencies. 4) Use a modular and isolated approach. 5) Configure and customize components. 6) Thoroughly test integration. 7) Implement error handling and graceful degradation. 8) Consider security implications. 9) Monitor performance. 10) Engage with vendor support and community. Follow these practices for successful integration, ensuring stability, security, and optimal functionality.

What I've done so far with unfamiliar third party components is: * List out potential libraries that resolve the problem; * Study the history of each project- does it reflect confidence that in a few years it is maintained; * Do a really small proof of concept implementation- does it really do what it promises, how easy it is to use as a developer. Combine the results, pick the library that has the best of each world. Remember to always abstract this kind of libraries away behind a custom interface. This enables you to replace the library with less effort if needed.

When integrating libraries that are not "industry standard" make sure to have your own abstraction between the library and your system. This makes it possible to replace the component if something happens. For example if you create an application that can scan EAN codes of products, you should create a Scanner interface that has a scan() method which returns the EAN as a string. The next step would be integrating a scanning library implementation. This way your application accesses the third party component through Scanner.scan(). If you fail to do so, you will have references to the library in your code in many places making the switch a painful process!

Given that components follow semantic versioning standards, you should use tools like Dependabot in GitHub or Renovate Bot to keep your dependencies up to date without manual interaction. The drawback is that this could possibly break the application, if minor version changes actually have breaking changes. Since most automated tests focus on the application itself and not the libraries, this issue will be reported by the end-users.

When using open source software components, be prepared to contribute security fixes and functionality to the software. Ask yourself - does my team have experience in the language used to write this open source software? What happens if it gets outdated? Are you prepared to fork it and maintain it as part of your software development efforts?