By Terrence Barr
Head of Solutions Engineering
Electric Imp
An underappreciated but critical aspect of successful IoT deployments is the ability to manage and scale the solution workflow through the entire life-cycle — from development, through testing, production, deployment, in-field updates and long-term maintenance.
Today, Electric Imp is announcing the availability of the next generation of impWorks™, a collection of powerful tools developed to enable comprehensive workflows for every phase of the solution life-cycle.
Software assets, tools, dependencies, versions, devices and deployment groups, test flows, software builds and rollouts, operational monitoring, and many more aspects need to be individually and collectively managed over the lifetime of the solution. The ability to automate and customize these workflows is essential for productivity, repeatability and scalability, and enables customers to build, deploy and manage IoT solutions with confidence — from low-volume IoT products to large-scale IoT deployments with millions of devices.
impWorks delivers these workflow productivity and automation capabilities and is deeply integrated with the security, scalability, and full life-cycle management capabilities of the Electric Imp platform.
We announced the first release of impWorks in April 2017. Today’s release fully leverages the capabilities of the Electric Imp impCentral™ development and management environment, and includes the following updates and improvements:
- A new tool, impt, which provides command-line and scriptable access to all features of impCentral
- A complete automated test framework for unit testing and continuous integration testing, integrated into impt
- An updated version of the Builder preprocessor
- An updated IDE plug-in for the Sublime text editor, with improved team collaboration capabilities (preview coming shortly)
impWorks is included at no cost for Electric Imp customers. Together, these tools make it even easier for developers and customers to create sophisticated workflows that integrate with existing operational processes, enhance developer productivity, improve the delivery flow, automate deployment operations, and reduce manual maintenance tasks. In short, enabling customers to create, deploy, and manage sophisticated and massively scalable IoT solutions through all phases of the life-cycle.
For more detailed information about impWorks, please see the Electric Imp Dev Center.