Thanks for having me in front of this awesome audience James! I’m Petyo and I’m the Glue42 Product Manager
I can see that there are people in the room who already know about Glue42;
for those that don’t Glue42 is a client side application integration platform – we take multiple apps, regardless of their technology and glue them together visually and logically. If you are familiar with platforms like OpenFin or ChartIQ – we operate in the same space, but we are more focused on the application integration aspect.
If anyone would like to know more, then please speak with me afterwards OR read this doc from Norman & Sons to understand the differences.
Subject of today's talk is progressive web applications and the exciting opportunities we believe they will offer to the way we develop software for the financial desktop. Many of you might not be familiar with PWA, that’s the reason why we are presenting here. If you are currently delivering web apps to the desktop – we consider this very relevant to you, regardless fi you are doing that through a browser or one of the available containers.
To back the claims I am making throughout the talk further, I would like to start with an announcement - we have made a large investment in this space by dedicating a sizable amount of our engineering efforts to an open source, PWA-based version of Glue42.
So how many of you have developed PWAs? (or looked into?)
A set of web technologies that Google started that aimed at improving the web experience. It’s essentially a set of requirements that, once satisfied, trigger the browser towards suggesting the user to “install” your web app on the device.
It was first available on Android…
This is how the experience of installation an android device looks like. It’s a very short video.
… And, as of recently, was brought to the desktop.
A couple of PWAs which make a great show case of the technology:
- Google Maps
- Office365 outlook
- And the Office365 homepage itself!
I think that we are yet to see more from Microsoft. Who would have thought?
Try those on your machine - they feel awesome. They do feel like Electron apps (and are similar to them). In a way, we think that Electron was the “proof of concept” for the idea.
Now, the examples I showed you are all single window, typical web apps. We believe that PWAs can do more than that...
A very common FS use-case where this would be required is in a bank, where they need to deploy a pre-configured set of integrated web-apps to their remote client desktops.
At present this requires the additional installation of an integration container – and implies the involvement and approval of IT-SEC to ensure that the container is secure and easily updated.
You can probably see the direction I am heading to. Can we do something like that with PWA and skip the additional installation step – several months ago, we decided to find out.
We took the integration core of our enterprise product and packaged it as a background thread that runs in the browser itself – it acts as an integration broker. Again, this requires no local deployment and is incredibly performant. We also ported the window management capabilities from our enterprise product to the PWA environment – let me show you how this works:
What you just saw is in fact a small subset of the capabilities of our new product – we call it Glue42 Core.
Now, let me iterate once again about what Glue42 Core is:
A browser based application integration platform
Instantly installable as a PWA for additional awesomeness
Now, the part which I am most excited about – Glue42 Core will be open source. Why are we doing that? We believe that commoditizing the interop application pattern will benefit both the users and the interop vendors. For example, the FDC3 spec right now does not have any real open source free to use implementation – Glue42 Core is going to support the easiest way for everyone to get started with it. We are also going to talk to FINOS once we flip the private to public switch.
Drop me an email at petyo.ivanov@glue42.com
Visit https://glue42.com/core for more details.
Follow us on twitter: https://twitter.com/glue42