Break New Ground
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DevOps
September 21, 2020
What's New In Oracle Visual Builder Studio - Sep 2020 Release
We are happy to announce the availability of the latest version of Oracle Visual Builder Studio, offering new features for both visual app development and overall DevOps for the Oracle cloud. In this blog we review some of the key features, but there are many others that you can read about in our "What's New" publication.
Quick note: the visual application development features are available right now if you are developing your app using VB Studio. If you are using the designer in a stand-alone Visual Builder or in Oracle Integration Cloud, you'll see these features a bit later, in an upcoming quarterly release. If you rather get these today, you can transition your development to Visual Builder Studio today importing your existing apps.
New Visual Application Features
Redwood
Redwood is the new Oracle user experience design language. Not only can you create your own web applications that leverage this new design with Visual Builder Studio, but we've also applied the Redwood design to the development environment for a better development experience.
For your web applications, Visual Builder now leverages Oracle JET 9 with the Redwood theme as the default for new apps. (You can still leverage the Alta theme if you prefer that one).
Improved Development Experience
We've redesigned the development environment to leverage Redwood not only to make it look better, but also to streamline your development experience.
You'll find many enhancements throughout the IDE, from a new layout for the visual page designer, to an easier experience for creating action chains. In addition we added many context aware capabilities that allow you to accomplish tasks faster, such as:
- You can create new variables directly in the assign variable action - no need to leave the context you are working in.
- You can create a JS function directly from the visual action chain's call module function action settings.
- In the visual editor, the component palette and structure pane now occupy the same space switching context as needed. This gives you more space to visually design your page, while retaining drag-and-drop across the visual editor, code editor, and the structure pane.
File Status Indicators
You can now easily identify audit errors in your app, thanks to colored highlighting across the code, the tab, and the app navigator.
In addition, keep track of the Git status of each file with icons shown in the application navigator.
Control Application Upgrades
With the new Visual Builder Studio you are in control of upgrades to your apps runtime dependencies. New versions of Oracle JET and the Oracle Visual Builder Runtime libraries will only be picked up by your application when you decide. This way upgrades of the design time environment won't impact the behavior of your applications.
DevOps Feature
NPM Repositories
Visual Builder Studio projects now include a private NPM repository for libraries, providing a place to store artifacts you are using in your NPM-based projects. In addition Visual Builder Studio's build processes know how to fetch artifacts from the private repository or public repositories as needed. This is an additional binary artifact repository beyond the existing Maven repo included in your projects.
Dependency Vulnerability Analyzer for Gradle
If you are using Gradle to manage your application's third party libraries dependencies, Visual Builder Studio can now analyze those dependencies for known vulnerabilities. Similar to the scanning functionality already offered for NPM and Maven based projects. Visual Builder Studio reviews the libraries you rely on against databases of known vulnerabilities, warns you of potential issues, and can even help you resolve those issues.
Create Git Merge from Command Line
Have some code changes that require a merge request process? With the new Git command line syntax you can create this review request directly from your command line, without the need to separately create it in the Web UI. Simply use a syntax such as:
git push -o mr.target=<target-branch> origin <feature-branch>
Improvement to Build Jobs
Several new features help you work with build jobs, including:
- Turn a build step on/off with a click of a button. A new switcher for every step allows you to enable/disable steps when needed, without removing them.
- Define exclude/include set of files that will trigger a build from Git changes.
- Get insight into reserved words when creating jobs.
Summary
With an improved user experience for the apps you create and the development experience around them, and with many new features that better help you manage and automate your code lifecycle, now is a great time to adopt Visual Builder Studio as your team's development platform.