News

Agile Platform 7 Simplifies Adoption of DevOps

• By John K. Waters
• May 31, 2012

Agile Web apps toolmaker OutSystems  released the latest version of its Agile Platform environment earlier this month. Version 7 comes with new features and capabilities designed to simplify the adoption of DevOps and to streamline cloud development, according to the company.

This release is designed to provide a unified environment for developing on-premise and multi-tenant cloud apps; dev teams are free to build single-tenant apps and then hand them off to the platform, which deals with the multi-tenancy requirements automatically. The platform also includes an app lifecycle management (ALM) feature designed to provide added control over dev projects without adding to operational complexity. The trick: automation across the development landscape.

The San Ramon, Calif.-based company's Agile Platform is a model-driven development (MDD) environment for building Web applications that automate business processes and bridge gaps among legacy apps, explained Mike Jones, OutSystems' vice president of worldwide marketing.

"Those types of applications tend not to have really well-defined requirements," Jones told ADTmag in an earlier interview. "Users know that they want to bring these two pieces of disparate application functionality together, but until they can see it, they can't envision how a system might work."

Agile Platform combines a visual IDE called ServiceStudio, an environment for creating connectors to existing enterprise systems, a runtime platform and a centralized management console. It supports development on a standard .NET or Java architecture. And though the platform itself is methodology agnostic, the onboard tools are SCRUM-based.

OutSystems began tweaking its Agile Platform to accommodate cloud-based deployments back in 2010. With this release of Agile Platform 6 last year, the platform became both a cloud-based deployment and production environment, evolving into a complete Platform as a Service (PaaS). Version 6.0, released last year, added new tools for mobile development, an enhanced UI and a series of pre-built business apps designed for easy customization.

With Version 7, the company introduces an integrated staging technology called LifeTime. Designed for ALM, LifeTime provides, among other things, an automated deployment process across all environments (from dev to test to production) which aims to simplify the collaboration between software developers and the operations people, better known as DevOps.

This release also includes the platform's tools for rapidly developing rich interfaces for Web and mobile applications to the Java world. From version 7 forward, in fact, all the new features of the Agile Platform will be supported on both the Java and .NET stacks simultaneously, the company says.

More information about Agile Platform 7 is available on the OutSystems Web site. The company is providing a free Community Edition on its download page.