CUBA platform in 2017: new features, new services, new plans

At the dawn of 2018, I want to take stock, and talk about changes in the CUBA platform over the past year. If 2016 became revolutionary for us thanks to the transition to open-source, then 2017 was a year of planned development: we focused on offering new features and services to our community.

New features in the platform and Studio

We start immediately with the most important. We released releases 6.4 , 6.5 , 6.6 and 6.7 , and in each were hundreds of minor and major innovations and improvements. Here are some:

Graphical interface

Polymer UI helps to create a flexible and adaptive web interface that interacts with the platform through the REST API. We recommend using Polymer for clients with increased or non-standard UX requirements, and creating back-office or administration screens using standard platform user interfaces,

Standard UI, in turn, has been replenished with new components:

• Pivot Table - pivot table, a convenient tool for analyzing data by the end user;
• Side Menu - side menu for flexible layout of screens;
• DataGrid is a more productive alternative to the standard table, which is able to display dynamic data;
• Full-text search as a condition of the universal filter: now the standard search criteria can be combined with the FTS query, which makes the filter even more powerful and user-friendly tool.

Among the new components are also, for example, Predictive search, Image, Currency, Browser frame .

Core platform

One of the key areas of development of the platform this year was the improvement of its API for the convenience of developers. Nevertheless, several innovations have appeared:

• Value datasources simplify working with arbitrary data sources, and cross-datastore references make it easy to combine data from different sources;
• The Bean validation mechanism helps centrally control constraints on the values ​​of entity attributes;
• Uber JAR simplifies the deployment of applications on CUBA;
• The new BI addon is responsible for integrating CUBA applications with the Pentaho platform;
• Integration with ZooKeeper , support for load balancing in a cluster, and versioning of the REST API make it easy to support scalable or distributed deployment configurations;
• Support for JasperReports templates in Report Generator expands the possibilities for creating pixel perfect reports.

Studio

In addition to supporting the platform’s new features, such as Bean Validation, Polymer UI, and value datasources, Studio also made other significant changes.

With the help of screen templates you can generate complex screens based on the built-in or your own templates. Support for multiple screen options for different devices makes it easy to create a responsive interface.

At the end of the year, we released Studio SE - a desktop version based on Electron. This saves developers from having to run a web server and provides auto-update.

New addons

Now there will be a teaser of what we have not yet published, but to which we put a lot of effort last year. We are working on a number of new - free and commercial - add-ons that extend the functionality of the platform. This will allow out of the box an even wider range of enterprise application requirements.

Here are some that we have especially advanced:

• WebDAV - support for the popular protocol for working with the cloud document storage;
• LDAP - advanced LDAP integration with support for assigning roles and access groups to users;
• IMAP - reading and displaying letters via IMAP with the ability to process mail events in the business logic of the application;
• Messengers - support of communication in popular messengers such as WhatsApp, Viber, Slack, etc .;
• Dashboard - dynamic area for displaying custom widgets;
• Rich Search - full-text search for menu items and screens;
• JavaMelody - integration with a popular monitoring tool;
• Admin Tools is a set of tools for deploying, maintaining, and troubleshooting CUBA applications.

We will start publishing new addons this spring. Then there will be a marketplace for their placement.

We also hope that marketplace will become a place where our community will share its development and components and contribute to the ecosystem of the CUBA platform.

New site and forum

In October, we moved our technical support forum to the modern Discourse engine. This gave us, in particular, a good search and navigation, support for markdown markup, adaptedness for mobile devices and enhanced communication capabilities between users. Taking into account the fact that more than 200 new topics have been created on the forum in the last month alone, we could not provide the community with a comfortable platform for sharing experiences.

In November, we added new services and licensing options for an English site. Now you can purchase not only services like trainings and online consultations, but also:

• buy a subscription to CUBA Studio and Premium add-ons for periods from 3 months to 3 years with automatic renewal;
• automatically get free trial access to Studio and commercial add-ons;
• manage your subscription, hours of consultations and the balance of incidents of paid support in your account.

This year, similar functionality will appear on the Russian site.

Interestingly, the shopping section on the site is also written on the CUBA platform! In it, we combined the portal on Polymer with a standard administrative client. To manage subscriptions and payments, we used integration with the Chargebee service.

New services

To help developers quickly understand the platform, we published 10 new free webinars and began to conduct regular trainings .

If your project needs quick and professional assistance, you can now buy advice directly on our website. If your solution is already in operation, you can enter into a technical support agreement with a guaranteed response time, and be sure that we will help you quickly understand the problem if it arises. In addition, by making the basic support package less weighty, we reduced the minimum price from $ 8,000 to $ 2,800 per year.

Perhaps the most notable change was the formation of a custom development team. Perhaps you already know that the CUBA platform was written by Haulmont. This is a Russian IT-company, which currently employs more than 300 people. The company is engaged in the development of corporate applications, so, of course, we were engaged in custom software development before. However, since last year we have identified a completely independent team that works on projects of CUBA platform clients.

We offer two main schemes of work:

• development of turnkey, where we ourselves implement all stages from the collection of requirements to support at the stage of industrial operation;
• and the combined scheme, when our experts complement the client's team. This provides significant synergy: the client-side team quickly acquires the required experience of working with the platform and, at the same time, brings to the project an understanding and possibility of close interaction with the business - an important condition for a successful project. In addition, the connection of our experts allows you to quickly expand the team if necessary.

Summing up, over the past year we launched a full range of services covering the needs of the project at any stage.

Conclusion

As you can see, the year for our team turned out to be productive. We hope that many of you have been following our blog and have already managed to try out new features and services. Now we are ready for a no less productive 2018, plans for which we will soon publish. As always, we are waiting for your ideas and suggestions on the forum .

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