IBM has revealed Microclimate, a development environment designed to simplify the process of app development in cloud environments. It aims to provide a flexible, end-to-end framework for all stages of the app development process.
“As a developer, you have so many choices that a new challenge has been created: How do you take full advantage of the options that work best for you and focus on developing great apps?” Andy Hoyt, vice president of the developer experience for IBM hybrid cloud, wrote in a post.“Our goal in creating Microclimate was to streamline the development process, so you can spend more time writing code and less time trying to cobble together all the services you need to create great apps.”
Microclimate extends and integrates with IBM Cloud Private, which is a platform that allows for the creation and management of on-premises cloud applications. It features a containerized development environment, diagnostic services, and integrated DevOps pipeline.
According to IBM, the development environment uses Docker containers to simplify the process of developing and moving apps between environments. It offers rapid iteration through all phases of development and provides intelligent feedback to allow developers to add in best practices and use feedback to improve applications.
“As the name implies, Microclimate supports development of apps using a microservices architecture. It’s designed to provide a common but flexible development framework so that microservices can work together regardless of who created them,” Hoyt wrote.
The diagnostic services are designed to improve problem determination in production and provide application metrics.
Developers can get started by creating new Java, Node, or Swift code in Microclimate, or can use the import functionality to bring in existing code.
In addition, it supports multiple frameworks, runtimes, IDEs, toolchains and pipelines; and can import existing services for developers looking to enhance or modernize existing projects.
