WSO2 has announced App Factory, a PaaS-enabled DevOps platform for the enterprise providing a set of integrating tools for creating, managing and governing applications along with the necessary runtimes to run those applications in the cloud.
The WSO2 App Factory runtime contains the tools necessary throughout the development lifecycle of applications, such as:
- Code repos: Apache Subversion, Git
- CI: Jenkins, Maven, Bamboo
- Issue/Project management: JIRA, Redmine
- Testing: Clover, FindBugs, JUnit
According to WSO2, App Factory can be integrated with “any SDLC [Software Development Lifecycle] toolset” and with “existing user repositories via LDAP or Microsoft Active Directory.”
Developers work locally with the IDE of their choice, but committing code to an App Factory repository or externally triggers the continuous delivery process, according to Chris Haddad, WSO2 VP of Technology Evangelism. Haddad told InfoQ that WSO2 intends to integrate the development environment in App Factory by providing a browser-based IDE in the future, so the entire toolchain will run in the cloud.
Applications developed with App Factory can be deployed to an app store making them available to the entire organization. The components of this DevOps platform are depicted in the following picture:
Besides project overview and configuration, the App Factory portal enables setting up several resources: database (currently MySQL), data stores accessed via JDBC, and APIs, the later being integrated with WSO2 API Manager. WSO2 intends to add support for Cassandra, MongoDB and CouchDB in the future, but organizations can add their own data store through the cartridge architecture WSO2 Stratos employs.
The portal also can be used to enforce corporate and government compliance, as Haddad explained to us:
When moving a project through stages (e.g. development, testing, and production), gate checklists are presented to validate compliance with corporate and government policies. Organizations may customize the gate checklists, and integrate automated test frameworks that ensure code compliance with corporate and government policies. Because project approval, promotion, and deployment are integrated in a single DevOps environment, teams are assured that the project complies with policies before being deployed into production.
As with other WSO2 products, App Factory is open sourced under Apache License 2.0.