Overview
Application Builder is an open-source tool that has been developed by Software AG Global Presales a few years ago to create web applications in a no-code approach.
It has served as the foundation for numerous demos built by Global Presales and was featured in the demo catalog.
Additionally, many open-source widgets were developed to enhance the functionality of applications created with Application Builder. These tools were developed and maintained by the Software AG Global Presales Team.
With this article we want to inform that the application builder, blueprint forge, demo catalog and all related plugins will be deprecated and might stop working soon.
As a migration path we would ask you to switch to default Cockpit app with the new plugin & blueprint concept.
Deprecation reasons
The main reason for deprecation is, that the functionality of application builder & co. has been succeeded by the plugin & micro frontend feature as an official core feature since 1016.
Check the following articles about this feature:
Cumulocity IoT’s application enablement capabilities have been enhanced significantly in the past year, particularly in the Cockpit application and Digital Twin Manager (DTM). Here are the key improvements:
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Digital Twin Manager:
- Create relevant context for IoT applications by modeling assets & their relationships
- Enhance your IoT data models with additional properties in Digital Twin Manager for improved contextualization​
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Dashboard Improvements:
- Enhanced dashboard layout with dashboard version history
- Introduced Dashboard Manager for managing dashboard templates
- Redesigned Alarms view and list widget with better filtering and sorting
- Advanced Data Point Graph 2.0 widget (Beta) with improved visualization options
- Addition of new widgets:
- KPI widget for performance metrics
- Markdown widget for formatted text display
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Simplified Cockpit application configuration
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Enhanced Branding Manager for easily managing consistent visual identity
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Support for both official and community plugins to extend platform functionality
Also, due to the acquisition of webMethods by IBM and to the organizational change of Cumulocity to become independent from Software AG, the Global Presales Team was separated and stopped to exist in the same form implementing the mentioned apps. Since then the mentioned open-source apps and plugins were only partially maintained while they were still used.
With the upcoming organizational change, Cumulocity will be totally independent from Software AG and therefore will not have access to the infrastructure which is used by some components in the background. Changing this would lead to huge efforts.
Additionally, with the latest angular version upgrade in the Cumulocity Web SDK, it is very likely that functionality will break, and the components will stop working without a lot of maintenance work.
For all the mentioned reasons, we decided to deprecate those components and ask for your understanding.
Next Steps
As a first consequence, we have already deactivated the demo catalog for all new trial users. While some demos are still working, they might stop working soon which is not a good first user experience with Cumulocity. If you still see the demo catalog in your tenant you can still use it, but they might stop working soon. Also, we will shut down the public demo catalog tenant, so it won’t be possible anymore to access all the demo parts of that catalog.
The next steps are to archive all open-source repositories including application builder, blueprint forge and all related widgets & plugins in our Cumulocity IoT GitHub Org.. We will add a deprecation notice in each repository before we archive them. They will be still selectable from the ecosystem page from within Cumulocity but with an additional “Archive” switch and a note that it is an archived plugin which might not work as intended.
Migration Path
We recommend transitioning from Application Builder and Blueprint Forge to Cumulocity’s standard blueprint and plugin framework, which is integrated into the enhanced Cockpit application. This approach offers greater flexibility for cloning and customizing applications to meet your specific needs.
If you want to migrate existing application builder dashboards to Cockpit there is a plugin available to automate this.
- Plugin: Releases · Cumulocity-IoT/cumulocity-community-plugins · GitHub or within the plugin store. “Application builder dashboard migration”
The plugin is an efficient way to migrate your dashboards with a single click on a button. The only thing you need to do manually is, to add the corresponding plugin widgets to the Cockpit so they can be visualized again.
For the demo catalog, we will provide new & improved demos soon which are currently in development by the presales team of Cumulocity. These newly developed demos will be communicated or demonstrated at events or here in announcements.
For plugins, we request you to first, evaluate the standard Cumulocity widgets and official plugins to determine if they meet your requirements For plugins without official replacements:
- Test if the existing plugin is still compatible If needed, fork the repository and modify the plugin
- Consider contributing your modified plugin back to the community as open source
If you need support migrating your apps away from Application Builder & co. we would be happy to support you! Just reach out to your sales / support contact.
RIP
The application builder, blueprint forge, demo catalog, and all related plugins were very creative, inspiring, and valuable components. We would like to thank all contributors who were part of the development of those components! Now it’s time to put them to rest and invest in new inspiring & innovative components. We would be happy if you would join us on that path and are looking forward to your contribution!