The front-end development trends have moved quite drastically in the last years: from a quick and dirty model-view-mixed approach (e.g. HTML, JavaScript-based frameworks like jQuery, JSP) to a more mature MVC-based approach (e.g. XHTML, TypeScript-based frameworks like Angular, RESTful web services). Consequently, the development cycle has evolved to an comprehensive procedure consisting of several steps from coding via linting via comiling via debugging via testing to deploying - requiring sophisticated development environments as well (e.g. IDEs with linting support, package managers, module bundlers/compilers, debugging support).
These trends have been driven by the end-users demanding user-friendly flexible interactive web front-ends, which they had been used to in the consumer industry, and affects the requirements for the frond-end development of business applications, too.
This evolution bears the following challenges:
How can webMethods Developers meet these requirements while keeping up with these trends in order to avoid depending on discontinued resources?
How does Software AG address this development and facilitate development of modern front-ends using mature technologies?
I’m looking forward to interesting discussions, useful experience exchange and promising announcements!
Hi Gerardo,
thanks a lot for drawing our attention to this development! That sounds indeed very interesting. I’m really looking forward to seeing the recording of this talk on Youtube.
BTW: Do you know if there is some kind of early preview beta version of the Designer based on Eclipse Che available? … assuming, of course, they develop such. Or has anybody tried to integrate the existing Software AG plugins/extensions with Eclipse Che?
Hi Marcus,
We are currently prototyping some of the designer functionality (e.g., Service Development, Process Development and Task Development) with Eclipse Che, and it is looking very promising. There is not yet a preview beta version. I am still waiting to hear back from RedHat as to when they will port the CheConf presentations on YouTube. Hopefully the quality is better than the crowdcast recordings. When the notify me, I will post that information here.
Hi Barry,
thank you for your quick answer and for keeping us up to date! Now we are really excited, though I’m personally more focusing on UI development at the moment. We would be glad to help you a bit with the beta testing.
This is an interesting thread. At IUG, if you can attend any of the sessions on “Dynamic Apps Platform” or Dynamic Applications, that would be a good place for insight into this topic. I will be in Berlin Wednesday and Thursday next week.
This thread correctly raises two distinct points - the future of web based developer experience with Software AG products versus the future of building modern web UIs for the applications built with the Software AG products. The former is aimed at developers and Eclipse Che is still the front-runner for a new “Design Time Server” that would be a multi-user, web-based platform to replace the single-user, local Eclipse Designer tooling we now have. The latter is a focus topic of the new Dynamic Applications roadmap. We are adopting a two pronged approach to this. First, we want to make it easy for developers to drag and drop existing assets, like a REST descriptor onto a canvas to automatically create a form with submit button to invoke a REST service. This will be based on AngularJS. And secondly, we will allow the developer to pick their own web UI framework and rendering in the Tomcat server baked into the Dynamic Apps runtime node. And tying these two together, the future web-based developer tooling will have a “perspective” for building web UIs.
@Barry:
Thanks for the update! I’ve watched some of the presentations meanwhile and got a good impression of where SAG is heading in terms of not only modern, but also efficient development - even despite the poor video quality.
@Jay:
Yes, indeed. I raised two points and I’m glad that the first one seems to be tackled properly by your move towards your Che-based Design Time Server. That will also help us to reduce the set-up time for new developers significantly while ensuring consistency between development environments.
With respect to the second topic, I’m sorry I’ve not only missed you at the IUG (since I haven’t had time to you read your post beforehand), but also missed some of the respective talks due to parallel sessions on other interesting topics. Hence, I’m really looking forward to the recordings of some of these talks (e.g. Mirza’s talk and Nandan’s talk on Thursday) as discussed in the webMethods feedback session on Friday.
Many thanks again for this very interesting and useful user conference!
