Nine months after our initial release, we are delighted to announce the second major version of our open-source product. Glue42 Core V2 comes with a simplified development and deployment model, cross-origin support, and customizable workspaces.
The most immediate feedback and feature request for Glue42 V1 was communication between multi-origin web applications. This was not a matter of integrating third-party applications; rather than dealing with large organizations that deploy their app over a variety of subdomains. Clients reported that their engineering/operations teams could not deploy shared workers on their root domain.
The second, equally important insight we gained was that the developer experience was overcomplicated. Newcomers stumbled upon the specifics of our command-line setup, and the additional deployment steps were often misunderstood.
From shared workers to direct postMessage between Apps
With Glue42 Core v2, we are addressing both of these problems by reimplementing the communication mechanism. Instead of using a central web worker for communication between the various clients, we are now relying on postMessage calls to exchange messages between the windows and the workspace frames.
With that change, Glue42 Core does not need any additional asset deployments on the server. This makes the development process much more straightforward. You don’t need the special gluec utility to integrate your applications. The caveat of the postMessage implementation is that, for applications to participate in the interop process, they have to be launched using the Glue42 Core start API from the application entry point or any other active window.
Customizable Workspaces
Another feature that found its way from the shared workspace implementation between Glue42 Core and Glue42 Enterprise is the ability to customize workspaces by injecting additional components in the workspace frame – a feature that shipped in Glue42 Enterprise 3.11. The same capability is now available in Glue42 Core, allowing you to embed various UI elements like search bars or navigation lists right inside your workspace. For more information on that capability, refer to the Extending Workspaces section in our documentation.
The best way to start with Glue42 Core is to walk through our tutorials – we have separate ones for vanilla JS, React, and Angular. If you would rather learn by exploring an existing implementation, you can browse the source code of the Start of Day demo platform.
As always, your feedback is gratefully received.
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