Code On Time is making a big bet on the RESTful API Engine to deliver the new benefits to our customers.

You and Your Apps

Applications created with Code On Time will gain the additional value of the following features without a single line of code written by developers.

IoT (Internet of Things)

Developers will be able to build apps serving as backends for devices that need to know the user identity and a way to read and write the user-specific data. The next release will support OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Flow flow for the input-constrained devices. You may have experienced this flow when authorizing a medical device to access your health data or when allowing a smartwatch to use your music service. The same flow is authorizing a smart TV in a hotel room to access the video streaming service that you are paying for at home.

Cloud Identity

Cloud Identity has been on our roadmap for several years. Soon developers will be able to build a collection of apps with one of them serving as the Identity Provider while the others will become the Identity Consumers.

• Each application will have its own security system.
• Users will identify themselves by signing into the Identity Provider. This app may have the 2-Factor Authentication enabled or include an option to authenticate users with the third-party providers such as Google, Microsoft, or Facebook.
• An application will become the identity consumer at runtime when the administrator creates a Cloud Identity link with another application. Device Authorization Flow will authorize the establishment of the link when approved by the administrator of the intended Identity Provider.
• Identity Consumer application synchronizes its roles and custom OAuth 2.0 scopes with the Identity Provider database. This makes it possible to manage users of the entire application collection in one place.
• RESTful API Engine access tokens will be issued by the Identity Provider application. The same access token will authorize requests to any application in the collection. The token will inherit the permissions configured in the Identity Provider by the collection administrator.

Microservices

Microservices Architecture becomes a reality with Code On Time even for the smallest of developer shops. Cloud Identity and access token portability across the collection of applications make it possible to create the frontend that will exchange data with multiple backend applications. Each backend provides a custom API, has its own performance characteristic, and can be deployed independently. This improves the stability of the frontend and its overall performance. Learn more in the Introduction to Microservices Architecture.

GraphQL

The upcoming built-in GraphQL processor will parse the queries and resolve them by executing the RESTful API Engine requests. GraphQL has emerged at Facebook as the query language for the complex collections of APIs. Their numerous apps needed small subsets of data from multiple sources, which required several requests fetching too much data. Graph QL server is the “fat client” that defines the supported query types. The server accepts the queries formulated as a graph and delegates the execution to the custom resolvers. The output of multiple resolvers is merged in the graph that matches the query.

Code On Time

The new engine makes it possible for us to deliver the following product innovations.

V9

The App Studio application is a part of each Code On Time installation. This local web app presently starts the product activation process by redirecting developers to the account management portal. App Studio will come with the RESTful API Engine enabled in the future releases. It will serve as the local project management portal that will replace the start page of the app generator, which will be relegated to the icon tray. It will also provide the backend to the v9 Live Project Designer. The code generator will be invoked in the command line mode by the RESTful API Engine of the App Studio in response to the developer activities in the Project Designer of live apps. This is the architectural departure from our original plan outlined in the Roadmap, but we are on the finishing line now to deliver the amazing development tools in the heads of developers.

Content Hub

Content Hub, our innovative publishing platform, creates the new content in our legacy public site. We have developed this platform for internal use. The hub agent monitors the shared drives in our corporate Google Drive and transforms the changed documents into the HTML-based Display Flow content published through the RESTful API to the account management portat. The portal feeds the content to the database of the legacy site. The following capabilities of the platform will become commercially available:

• Content Hub Agent will monitor Google Drive, Office 365, and network folders for the content in Microsoft Word Format. The agent is a multi-platform application. Changes are pushed to the hub-enabled application built with Code On Time.
• Content Hub Add-On for applications created with Code On Time will render the content imported by the hub agent as public pages, blog posts, documentation library, newsletters, helpdesk tickets, public forum posts, etc.

Add-on will provide the interactive content editor based on Touch UI. It will customize the presentation style of the live “content hub” pages. It will create tickets and community posts from within the apps built with Code On Time in the same format that is used by the hub agent. It will invoke the RESTful API of the app to read and write the hub content.