When building an application, how do you find the APIs, apps, or other components that you need? Is it documented in a central repository that all developers can easily access? Is it in an Excel sheet? Or, do you rely on hallway conversations with your fellow developers? And once you find the asset you are looking for, is it clearly documented so you understand how the component functions and can use it effectively in your own application?
The reality is that most developers spend significant time on low-value and repetitive tasks like finding or creating infrastructure components, reverse engineering applications that aren’t properly documented and lack clear ownership, checking compliance with enterprise policies and standards, or other operational tasks. Unfortunately, this prevents developers from focusing on their most valuable responsibility—creating the innovative digital services that impact the customer experience and other revenue-generating business operations.
The rise of platform engineering
Platform engineering has emerged as a new strategy to reduce the cognitive load on software developers by standardizing the development and deployment of applications. Typically this results in a central portal that brings together all essential resources so your developers can quickly find what they need, when they need it. This can help even the most experienced developers get their projects out the door faster, while also reducing the time to on-board new developers by up to 55%!
To address this rising trend, TIBCO built the newly released TIBCO® Platform on the principles of platform engineering and now offers the TIBCO® Developer Hub, a centralized developer portal built on open-source Spotify Backstage technology. The TIBCO Developer Hub offers a variety of self-service tools and resources that will streamline your development and deployment workflows.
TIBCO Developer Hub: A one-stop shop
As the questions posed at the beginning of the blog highlight, one of the biggest challenges for developers is quickly finding enterprise assets and documentation. At best, developers could waste hours looking for the right asset. At worst, they could waste days building duplicates of assets that already exist.
Fortunately, one of the key features of the TIBCO Developer Hub is a central repository where developers can easily find everything they need: APIs, applications, templates and other TIBCO and non-TIBCO components. Each of these components will link directly to the documentation with clear code ownership assigned so developers can quickly understand how these assets operate and who to contact with any further questions.
Additionally, the TIBCO Developer Hub can be customized to integrate with your preferred developer tooling for additional functionality through an extensive ecosystem of 170+ plug-ins to popular technologies like Azure Pipelines, Jenkins, SonarQube, and more!
Easily identify relationships between enterprise assets
However, even if individual components are clearly documented there is often no clear understanding of how these components interact with each other in your business systems. Understanding these system dependencies is key to planning upgrades to existing systems or components without negative impacts on downstream applications.
Fortunately, the TIBCO Developer Hub offers visual relationship graphing so you can immediately understand the high-level architecture of your systems and easily conduct impact analyses to plan future changes. From the system architecture views, you can easily dive into each individual component and find the detailed documentation and API specifications.
Quickly generate new applications with customizable templates
If you have 10 applications that all use the same basic framework, then why waste valuable resources building it 10 different times? With the TIBCO Developer Hub, you can build, publish, and share a common application template that already adheres to your enterprise security and governance policies. Your developers can then re-use that template to quickly generate a new application so they can focus their time on building the high-value business logic.
To help you get started even faster, TIBCO will also provide a library of pre-built assets based on common integration patterns that we see across our customer base that you can use as-is or further customize to meet your unique enterprise requirements
Learn more about the TIBCO Developer Hub
If you’d like more information on platform engineering and the TIBCO Developer Hub, good news—we have the perfect resource! Last week, we held a TIBCO Tech Talk webinar, co-hosted with the Spotify Backstage team, that provided key insights on developer portals, demos of the TIBCO Developer Hub, and provided attendees with everything they needed to know about improving developer efficiency.
Catch-up on what you missed and watch the complete recording of this webinar here.
And if you want to guarantee you’ll be in attendance for our upcoming TIBCO Tech Talk in September, click here to register! You’ll learn about an exciting collaboration between TIBCO and Behaim ITS to automatically generate technical documentation for your solutions inside the TIBCO Developer Hub.
