Platform Overview
Welcome to Servoy!
This guide will provide an introduction to the platform and key concepts.
What is Servoy?
Servoy is a comprehensive, low-code platform to build, deploy and manage core systems and enterprise-grade applications. It combines the speed of low-code with the level of control provided by traditional tooling.
Who uses Servoy?
Servoy is primarily used by enterprise application teams and independent software vendors (ISVs). Unlike many low-code platforms, Servoy caters directly to IT users and professional developers. This is because Servoy provides standards-based, open-source tooling in an extensible, comprehensive low code platform.
What can be built?
Servoy developers build applications for the browser, but also mobile devices, native desktop and headless automation. The platform enables specialized user experiences, intricate workflows and powerful business logic. Developers can build both systems of record and systems of engagement that interoperate and serve many users across different devices and environments, at scale.
How Does it Work?
The following are a few key concepts that drive the developer experience.
Data Connectivity
Servoy applications are inherently data-connected and data-driven. Developers can connect to any database, web-service, flat file or legacy system. Servoy works particularly well with relational database systems, providing enhanced capabilities for connecting, querying and updating databases. Developers can blend data from many sources, quickly build data-bound user interfaces and easily execute logic against their data models.
Visual Modeling
The platform provides visual modeling elements to simplify development including data modeling, entity design, business objects, UI design, navigation and event routing. This greatly simplifies complex applications.
Scripted Logic
Servoy embodies the idea that a great low-code platform should provide a great coding interface to increase productivity and control when application logic is needed. Servoy provides a JavaScript engine and a catalog of self-documenting APIs to solve any problem. Moreover the platform includes the tooling to make the job easy, such as code completion, examples, debugging and more.
Platform Components
The following is a summary of the basic components of the Servoy platform.
Servoy Developer
Servoy Developer is the integrated developer environment (IDE) where most of the development is done. Servoy Developer provides all of the tools to build and debug applications in a single package, including visual editors for modeling and UI design, a robust code editor and debugging tools.
Servoy Core
The core consists of a design-time object model and the developer API. The object model contains all the design-time elements in the application, including data sources, business objects and forms. The developer API includes a catalog of packages for many common runtime operations.
Servoy Extensions
The Servoy platform uses an open-architecture design and provides extension points throughout the stack. By default, the platform ships with many UI components, plugins, modules and themes. Developers can also extend the platform to solve any challenge. Servoy Developer includes the Package Manager, which can be used to include the following extensions in any project.
UI Components
The Servoy platform includes a comprehensive catalog of UI components. These range from common input controls to specialized components for data visualization, document editing and more. UI components can be assembled in the form editor, a drag-and-drop interface to design the UI. Developers can also include 3rd-party or custom components in their projects.
Plugins
Servoy's toolkit includes a scripting interface to control application logic. Code is written using the core developer API and plugins for specialized logic. The platform ships with a large catalog of plugins to handle common programming tasks, such as email, http, file i/o and much more. Developers can also include 3rd-party or custom plugins in their projects to meet any integration challenge.
Themes
At a fundamental level, Servoy applications are styled using CSS/LESS. However developers do not need to be proficient in these technologies. Themes provide a higher-level abstraction to simplify styling, making applications consistent and easy to maintain.
Modules
The Servoy platform is designed on the principle of composable architecture and applications may also become modules, encapsulating business objects and code to be reused in other applications. Servoy ships a number of general and specialized modules and developer may build their own modules to use best-practices in application design.
Servoy Application Server
Servoy provides an application server which brokers data source connections and manages all the client sessions. The server, applications and modules may be deployed together in a simple self-contained docker image or war file. Applications may be deployed in any of the following client types.
NG Client
The NG Client is the primary runtime of the Servoy platform. It is a light-weight web application (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript) and runs in any modern browser. It implements a model-view-controller (MVC) design.
NG Mobile
Responsive web applications built in Servoy may be deployed through the NG Mobile client wrapper for iOS and Android devices. Additional plugins give developers access to device APIs, such as camera, GPS, push notifications and more.
NG Desktop
Servoy applications may be deployed through the NG Desktop client wrapper for Windows, Mac and Linux devices. Additional plugins give developers access to desktop APIs, such as filesystem, local hardware, printers, scanners, etc.
Headless Client
Some applications are not meant to have and end-user or a UI. For this purpose, Servoy provides the Headless Client, which can be used for automation jobs, parallel processing and REST API generation. All the same tools and concepts apply, except for UI design.
ServoyCloud
Applications built in Servoy can be deployed in any environment; on-premise, self-hosted, public or private clouds. In addition to the tools to build and deploy applications, Servoy provides specialized cloud infrastructure to automate software delivery and high-availability (HA) production environments to host, monitor and manage production applications.
Delivery Pipelines
ServoyCloud provides a flexible, low-touch DevOps control center to manage and automate the software delivery lifecycle and maintain quality.
Revision Control (Git) Integration
Build Automation
Quality Control and Test Automation
Artifact repositories
Docker Orchestration
Production Environments
ServoyCloud provides specialized infrastructure and production environments to remove the burdens of hosting and provide stable, scalable and secure applications anywhere on the planet. The following are just some of the specialized components of ServoyCloud production hosting:
Full-stack container monitoring and log management
Application performance monitoring
User insight and analytics
Zero-downtime deployments
Auto-scaling pods and infra based business hour rules
Full backup/restore and disaster recovery scenarios
Auto-renewal of keys and certificates
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