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Introducing the WSO2 App Factory

By definition WSO2 App Factory is a multi-tenant, elastic and self-service Enterprise DevOps platform that enables multiple project teams to collaboratively create, run and manage enterprise applications.

Oh! kind of confusing? Yes, as most other definitions, only a few will grab what App Factory means from the first look at its definition. If it’s explained it in simpler words, WSO2 App Factory is a Platform as a service (PAAS) which manage enterprise application development from the cradle of the application to the grave.

(Still confusing…? Figure below illustrates the move from the traditional on-premise software to cloud based services. You can see the Platform as a service in the third column.)

PAAS illustration

Unless it is a university assignment or test, every real world application development has to undergo several phases until it is ready to go live. Applications has to be designed, developed and sent to QA for testing. Then, QA has to test them rigorously before approving for production. Then the bug fixing and stabilization phase. When the software is ready, it gets deployed. Finally when the application completed its job, it is needed to be retired.

Organizations have to use a number of tools in each of the above phases. For instance, developers may be using SVN for creating code repositories, maven or ant for building the projects, JIRA for ticket tracking and various other tools for finding bugs in the application. Above tools are independent of each other which results in organizations having to put a considerable effort in deploying those tools. If you are a developer, QA manager, system administrator or a DevOps or any other stakeholder who is involved in application development, there is no doubt that you have endured the pain of above and you might be wondering “Is there one single tool which does the work of all of the above tools?”. WSO2 App Factory does exactly that. By using App Factory you gain all the support for your application development, all under one roof.

Individual building blocks of the App Factory is illustrated in the below diagram.

wso2_appfactory-topology

Diagram 1 depicts the components of the App factory. Management portal, what is the main interaction point to the system is at the center. Source code management, issue trackers and other features are accessible via the portal. When a developer created an app via the management portal, he is provided with a space in the repo , space in the build environment and a project  in the issue tracker and so on. You clone from the repository you are provided into your development machine. Then develop the application with your favorite programming IDE and commit. WSO2 is planning to rollout a browser based IDE in the future to make the complete lifecycle run on the cloud. The application you are developing is continuously built in the cloud using your built tool. If automatic build is enabled, the build process will be triggered automatically when you commit. If auto deploy is enabled, the app will be deployed in the development cloud automatically after the build. Then after the development is completed, the apps will be promoted to the test cloud.  This promotion will retire the apps from the development cloud and deploy them in the test cloud. QA department will test them, promote to the production or staging cloud if tests pass or demote again to the development cloud if fail. The ultimate step is to send the apps to the app store enabling users to discover the apps. The most interesting thing is, all the above tasks can be executed using a single tool via a single management portal.

wso2_appfactory-lifecycle

Features of App factory

    1. Self-Provisioning of the workspace and resources such as code repository, issue tracking, build configuration and bug finding tools… etc.
    2. Support a variety of application

○     Web applications
○     PHP
○     Jaxrs
○     Jaxws
○     Jaggery
○     WSO2 ESB
○     WSO2 BPEL
○     WSO2 Data services

  1. Gather developers, QAs and DevOps of the organization to the application workspace
  2. Automate continuous builds, continuous tests and development activities
  3. One click solutions for branching and versioning
  4. Deploy application into WSO2 rich middleware stack
  5. No need to change your way of doing things

○     App factory can be configured to integrate with your existing software development life cycle.
○     Integrate with your existing users via LDAP or Microsoft Active directory

WSO2 AppFactory applications integrated

Yes, WSO2 App Factory is customizable. For instance organizations are not required to use the tools that App factory supports, they can plug in a tool of their preference. It is a matter of integrating another tool. Different organizations have different workflows, still App Factory can be configured to suit their own workflows.

In summary WSO2 App Factory is a cloud enabled DevOps PAAS for enterprise which manages the entire life cycle of an application. It leverages the application development giving enterprises a competitive advantage in the cloud.

Enough of talking, so help yourself by visiting App Factory preview in live. It is free and open source.

This article is just a bird’s eye view of the WSO2 App Factory. Visit its home page to broaden your knowledge. Good short video about the product is shown below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljtR37__jFY

      

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Udara Liyanage

Software Engineer at WSO2
Commiter and PPMC Member of Apache Stratos.

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