Pioneering Continuous Digital Transformation
The Latest Platform Releases, Enhancements & Disruptive Innovations In Production!
- Crowd Academy Developer Enhancements | June 3, 2019
- Crowd Machine GO | Upcoming Release
- Blockchain & Smart Contracts | Currently In Development
- Crowd Computer | Currently In Development
Crowd Machine Labs
Crowd Machine is continuously innovating with a view toward delivering against our core vision – to reduce the educational and technical barriers associated with building, deploying and hosting enterprise grade applications and solutions. To deliver upon that goal, we are constantly improving our products based upon user feedback – always striving to deliver the best in user experiences, and innovative products.
New Releases, Enhancements, Updates & In Development
User Experience, Market Driven Enterprise Demand & Ingenious Creativity Drive Our Priority List, Check Out What Is Happening In The Lab Today!!!
Status: Released On June 3, 2019
Crowd Academy Developer Enhancements
Crowd Academy Gets Even Better! Our mission is to ensure a fun, engaging, and meaningful learning experience for all of our users, from professional developers to users without coding experience, as they learn how to build, deploy & manage business applications with Crowd App Studio. Crowd Academy’s Seven Base learning journey, a Crowd Machine App itself, has been enhanced to: provide flexibility in the curriculum, to supplement knowledge resources, and to tailor learning to a user’s specific level of app dev experience, including an in depth developer’s ‘Getting Started’ guide that gets software professionals quickly up to speed on Crowd App Studio Essentials.
Key changes include:
- Getting Started Guide in Developer Friendly Syntax
- Professional Developer vs. Non-developer Learning Pathways
- Improvements to Knowledge Base
- Free Movement Curriculum
- Introduction of User Interface Module Later in the Curriculum
With a new, non-linear curriculum, cadets can migrate freely through the bases. Experienced developers can move quickly and expedite existing application deployment through Crowd App Studio. Extra learning links add new video tutorials, articles, and guides, plus the Forum is there for your questions. We listened, and divided data-driven modules and user interface modules into groupings that facilitate a shorter learning curve in the earlier bases of Crowd Academy. And, you will get to build an entirely new sales application that demonstrates the critical functionality to quickly get you started in Crowd Machine app development.
Knowledge is Power, Join the New & improved Crowd Academy today
Crowd Machine GO
Enabling continuous digital transformation, Crowd Machine’s Go Solution consists of two components:
- The Crowd App Studio that allows IT Departments to develop GO Gadgets (comprised of Apps and App functional components); and
- The GO configuration interface that allows business line users to assemble solutions comprised of GO Gadgets, and the GO visualization experience where those configured Gadgets perform their intended function.
Crowd Machine GO provides a powerful no-code visualization, data exploration, and data management platform for enterprise line of business management and IT. Crowd Machine GO integrates and utilizes Crowd Machine Applications, Patterns, Activities and data Packages to facilitate new views of business-critical information and to invoke processes and logic to effect new outcomes while remaining within the GO interface. GO enables an IT department to rapidly create integrated sets of microservices over existing enterprise solutions. Business line users can then assemble compliant custom solutions, simply by snapping the microservices together to meet their immediate application needs. The approach allows digital transformation to occur across the enterprise and reduces IT project backlog burden.
IMAGINE the ability to automate the functionality and utilization of data in legacy solutions – a scenario where a process in SAP requires data from PeopleSoft and Salesforce as well as user interaction to function. The IT Department could create a Gadget that, based upon some user input, extracted data from the PeopleSoft and Salesforce solutions, executed a set of logic, in the form of Crowd App Studio rules, and then invoked the SAP process in the background, without the user having to leave their GO interface. Furthermore, that Gadget could also be linked to another Gadget, that displays the status of the process to the user, that they may optionally include in their GO experience. Go, when combined with the Crowd App Studio, also allows completely new functionality to be created, that may have no interaction with legacy solutions, it is all up to the IT Department.
Status: Upcoming Release
Status: Currently In Development
Automated Smart Contracts
Blockchain Agnostic
Crowd Machine is blockchain agnostic where the Crowd App Studio can be used to build apps for any blockchain.
With the rapid proliferation of numerous different blockchain products, we believe we’ll see a number remain generic but we also believe a number will verticalize into industry or task specific offerings.
Integrate Into Any Blockchain
We’re creating the technology to allow blockchain vendors, or our community, to integrate any blockchain into the Crowd Machine technology suite. Anyone will be able to map the native calls of the underpinning blockchain into the predefined Crowd Machine methods.
The result is that as an app Builder using Crowd App Studio, the same set of methods can be used for any blockchain which means that App Builders will be able to interchange blockchains at will.
Define Contract Logic
The concept of writing a specific contract is no longer required. Crowd Machine is allowing app Builders to define their contract logic in the Crowd App Studio and have that logic applied to the underpinning smart contract automatically.
Furthermore, Crowd Machine will facilitate blockchain interoperability to enable our customers to transition blockchains seamlessly.
Decentralization of the Crowd Computer
The Crowd Computer is an extension of the existing Crowd Machine centralized offering. The existing nodes are responsible for the management of apps and include all aspects of app runtime execution, load management, and security. The nodes also manage a large number of the services that Crowd App Studio apps leverage.
The current centralized model removes many aspects of app development that software engineers need to undertake manually to get their app to market. The result is reduced technical knowledge to build an app, faster time to market with associated reduced cost as well as more highly optimized utilization of hardware and network infrastructure.
Status: Currently In Development
Continuing Enhancements
Unrelenting improvement delivers sustained rewards. At Crowd Machine, we look to make our best, even better!!!
Remote Connections
Reach is Crowd Machine’s behind-the-firewall integration engine. It allows enterprises to integrate into numerous legacy databases, OData services, LDAP, MS Active Directory and RESTful APIs.
Reach has been in test for some time with enterprise customers who use it extensively to extend existing solutions without incurring the cost of expensive integration platforms. Reach is currently being productized and will be made available publicly for free.
Runtime Package Creation
Packages are constructs in Crowd Machine that act much like objects, however, they manage the persistent storage of data. The easiest way to think of them is a combination of a functional class with database storage capabilities. Packages can be either wholly contained within Crowd Machine or be virtual representations of external objects, both on-premise or Cloud. Crowd Machine is allowing the creation of Packages at runtime.
This will allow Crowd App Studio users to create packages based upon user input or app need. Crowd Machine will also be extending the Natural Language engine to allow app Builders to reference these packages via rules at runtime, given that they don’t exist at design time.
Increased Performance
Crowd Machine is highly optimized for performance. The Crowd Computer, regardless of its deployment configuration, fragments apps into synchronized and asynchronized Activities. Where an Activity is split into multiple instances, they are routed to queues for execution. Where the Pattern resumes post the split, the App Builder is currently responsible for management of any race condition that may ensue.
To remove the burden from the App Builder, Crowd Machine is implementing a split-merge management engine so that downstream Activities dependent upon the split will wait until notified that all instances of the previous Activity have completed before continuing.
Team Collaboration
Team collaboration is being built into the Crowd App Studio. Check in and check out of Patterns and Packages will be implemented to better control collaborative efforts. App Builder roles are also being provided to enable better control builder privileges.
Recently Released Updates
White-Labeling
The white-labeling functionality allows Application Designers to host app components under their preferred URL, and customize various other components to comply with digital marketing requirements and branding. The following white-labeling functionality has been implemented:
- Hosting under a customized domain name. Configure custom domain names for an organization, allowing Application Designers to host applications (or components of an application) under their preferred custom domain name.
- Viewing pages in a web browser using nice URLs. Nice URLs (also referred to as clean URLs) improve the usability and accessibility of URLs by removing the parameter details from URLs.
- Enabling Google web crawler support. Application Designers can generate a sitemap to improve the searchability of their applications created in Crowd App Studio. A sitemap provides information about pages and helps the Google search engine locate them.
- Adding an application icon (also referred to as a favicon). Add an application icon to display on browser tabs to improve the user experience and brand recognition.
- Optimizing pages to help improve traffic quantity. Added SEO (Search Engine Optimization) functionality, which includes:
- Open Graph Meta Tags for social media.
- HTML tags to declare a title and description for a page.
- Enabling Google Tag Manager support to track and measure site metrics.
- Customizing system-generated emails. Branded system-generated emails that are sent to users, and include additional information in the message.
Private Certificates
Crowd Machine is providing the ability for App Builders to redirect their own domains to their Crowd Computer apps and use their own SSL certificates. This implementation is applicable to both Crowd Machine’s public Cloud and, when it’s fully released, Decentralized Cloud Crowd Computer deployments.
