It’s often easy to lose sight of just how far we’ve come as a platform. Things that we as Agilers take for granted are often difficult, and in some cases downright impossible with other platforms. Today is not one of those days.
Today, I am pleased to announce one of the most awaited features i.e. Package Manager. To understand the impact that Package Manager will have for our clients, and why it is such a monumental leap forward, let’s take a quick trip down memory lane.
Back in 2010, we’d released AgilePoint V5. While some of the core platform components like the process engine and manage modules were established, looking back the platform looks nearly unrecognizable in comparison to today. This is especially true when it came to deploy a process, it had a lot of moving parts! You had to move process and then separately had to manually move external forms like ASP.Net, JavaScript, CSS, connection strings and all shared dependencies like roles, groups, shared variables etc. Not only was it time consuming, but was also fraught with errors. Not a good look.
Things improved drastically in V6, where the concept of an application or app was introduced, which facilitated 1-click deployment of the parent and child processes, forms, access tokens, JavaScript, CSS, email templates, all bundled together into a single package which was deployed using single-click process. This was a huge hit amongst our developer community because it gave increased control and simplified application deployment as a whole. This made the configuration management teams life a lot easier. The apps still had shared dependencies like shared variables, roles, groups, global access tokens etc. which had to be setup one time manually.
However, as we added more features like Data Entity and Page Builder and the breakneck pace of Digital Transformation has prompted AgilePoint customers to create hundreds if not thousands of applications, and it became clear we needed to reinvent how applications are deployed once again.
Now, starting in AgilePoint NX V9, deployment is no longer about applications and processes, but the deployment of the complete solution – custom landing pages, administrative and dependent apps, and apps that are related in one way or another. In short, everything all at once!
With that, I am delighted to introduce the Package Manager, which will allow developers to:
- Create New Packages
- Edit components of an existing package – add or delete apps, dependencies and landing pages
- Remove packages from the repository
- View Package audit history, including deployment history
- Apply permissions to the Package
- Import / Export Package file
- Include deployment instructions for the Package
- Apply a password to the Package for security purposes.
- Auto include new app dependencies in future versions of the package.
As always, this feature was driven primarily by feedback from our developer community, and we can’t wait to hear from you about just how much it simplifies a wide range of deployment scenarios! The same feature is also exposed using API so that you can create your own CI/CD pipeline. I will cover this is a separate blog.
Thanks so much for reading, now, let’s look at this feature in action!
Note: Please note that this video is recorded while this feature is in beta version. Some of the labels and icons might change by the time it goes GA but the general concept of configuring these activities would remain the same.