CUBA Platform in 2017: New Features, New Services, New Plans / Haulmont Blog

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

New features in the platform and Studio

Let's start right away with the most important. We released releases 6.4 , 6.5 , 6.6 and 6.7 , and each one had hundreds of small and large innovations and improvements. We list a few:

GUI

Polymer UI helps create a flexible and responsive web interface that interacts with the platform through the REST API. We recommend that you use Polymer for customers with advanced or non-standard UX requirements, and create back-office or administration screens using the standard platform user interface,

The standard UI, in turn, was replenished with new components:

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

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

Platform core

One of the key areas of development of the platform this year was to improve its API for the convenience of developers. Nevertheless, several innovations 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 to centrally control restrictions on the values ​​of entity attributes;
• Uber JAR simplifies application deployment on CUBA;
• The new BI addon is responsible for integrating CUBA applications with the Pentaho platform;
• Integration with ZooKeeper , support for load balancing in the cluster, and versioning of the REST API make it easy to support scalable or distributed deployment configurations;  
• Support for JasperReports templates in the Report Generator extends the ability to create pixel perfect reports.

Studio

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

Using screen templates, you can generate complex screens based on 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 eliminates the need for developers 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 made a lot of efforts last year. We are working on a number of new - free and commercial - add-ons that expand the functionality of the platform. This will cover out of the box an even wider range of enterprise application requirements.  

Here are a few that we have particularly advanced in:

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

We will start publishing new add-ons this spring. Then a market place for their placement will appear.

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

New site and forum

In October, we moved our tech support forum to the modern Discourse engine. This gave us, in particular, good search and navigation, support for markdown markup, adaptability for mobile devices and advanced communication between users. Considering that over the last month alone the forum has created more than 200 new topics, we could not help but provide the community with a comfortable platform for the exchange of experience.

In November, we added new services and license purchase options for the 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 client for administration. 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 help, now you can buy consultations directly on our website. If your solution is already in operation, you can conclude 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 $ 8000 to $ 2800 per year.

Perhaps the most noticeable change was the formation of a custom development team. You may 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 enterprise applications, therefore, of course, we were engaged in custom software development earlier. However, since last year, we have allocated a fully independent team that works on projects of CUBA platform clients.

We offer two main schemes of work:

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

To summarize, over the past year we have launched a full range of services covering the needs of the project at any stage.

Conclusion

As you can see, the year has been productive for our team. We hope that many of you have followed our blog and 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 .

Stay tuned and join the community!