DEVOPSdigest

IBM announced new capabilities for developers on Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform.

Accessed via the Bluemix Developer Console, these new tools provide developers with new code patterns and building blocks which help to quickly create cloud apps across web and backend systems, along with mobile.

As an extension of the Bluemix Mobile Dashboard, the Bluemix Developer Console expands ready-to-code patterns into web and backend apps, helping to cut development time by generating the necessary elements that developers need to spin up cognitive apps, including boilerplates and building and configuring code.

With traditional cloud architectures, developers can spend hours or days setting up microservices and connecting them into other components. The Bluemix Developer Console accelerates this process by offering templates of ready-to-code applications complete with integrations into databases, as well as cognitive and security services.

In the console, developers can easily select the type of building block they would like to create, followed by which services they want to incorporate into their app (such as a Cloudant database, the Watson Conversation API, or push notifications). After choosing a language, the console will generate a starter project pattern to download and edit, deploy locally or to Bluemix, and add more services.

The increased speed at which developers can build apps with patterns is especially critical in time-sensitive industries, such as finance and healthcare. For example, using the Bluemix Developer Console, a fintech developer could access the tools needed to quickly build a cognitive chatbot into a customer-facing investment app, helping provide users with a new way to interact with intelligence around investment possibilities.

These patterns include the Mobile App pattern, which enables developers to easily integrate with mobile services like Push and Mobile Analytics; data services like IBM Cloud Object Storage and Cloudant; as well as security capabilities using AppID. Additional patterns available in this expansion include:

- Web App for building a client-side web app. Depending on the pattern, developers can download runnable code pre-baked with modern web technologies and tools like Gulp, Sass, React, webpack, and more.

- Backend for Frontend for implementing logic to support a mobile or web front end. This pattern allows developers to easily integrate cognitive intelligence, data, security services and other backend patterns into their apps.

- Microservice to get a starter code for implementing server-side logic for a single function, which is reusable by multiple clients. This comes with a pre-configured manifest.yml or Dockerfile, so developers can run it as a CloudFoundry application or in a Docker container anywhere.