Our team has released the fourth and most important revision to the Weavy X platform: Weavy version 14.0. Weavy 14 is a landmark release as it brings all of our collaboration APIs: In-App Chat, Files, and Feeds into our new codebase, backend, and authentication scheme.
Files API and Feeds API, rewritten to the coreThe major goal behind Weavy X was to take our legacy code, dating back to our earliest days as an add-on for Microsoft Dynamics Connect, and migrate it to .NET Core. Moving to .NET Core allows the backend to run on any platform: Windows, Linux, macOS. It also enabled us to offer Weavy.io, our new cloud hosted backend system that allows developers to deploy a collaboration server instance in minutes.
This was no small undertaking, and required nearly all of our code to be completely rewritten from scratch. For the sanity of our development team and to ensure the best possible quality control we committed to releasing each API one at a time, beginning with In-App Chat, our most popular product. Owing to their incredible complexity and the depth of features, our Files API and Feeds API were the most time consuming projects, but thanks to an undertaking that one developer described as “really very difficult” we can proudly say that all of our products are built in .NET Core.
In addition to the new code base, all of Weavy’s APIs now have additional webhooks for activities, enabling richer integration between Weavy and the host app, including but not limited to more robust notifications or analytics. We’ve also added more robust tagging, which will enable new possibilities for in-app search or user grouping.
With our Files API and Feeds API now part of Weavy X, that means developers can now take full advantage of our Drop-in UI no matter which API they implement. Moving away from our JS iFrame UI gives developers greater control over front-end customization that doesn’t require modifying the backend, it also gives end users a significant improvement in performance and app responsiveness. We've also added a new dark mode to all of our APIs, as well as additional CSS styling options.
The new Weavy X Files API and Feeds API are also compatible with our upcoming UI kits. These UI kits are built with native UI components for frameworks like React and Angular, as well as mobile frameworks, making embedding Weavy’s APIs more seamless than it already was. The first UI kit for React UI is already available, and we’ll have more updates to come as we release future UI kits.
Starting with Weavy X, all versions of the Weavy Server SDK have been published on Microsoft’s NuGet package manager. In addition to that, our UI components have been published on the npm package manager. This has meant that developers working in Visual Studio, MSBuild, SharpDevelop, or the .NET Core SDK can download, install, upgrade, or customize Weavy’s front and back end components directly from the command line. Weavy v14 extends this flexibility to developers working with Files and Feeds.
To learn more about Weavy X and best practices for implementation, you can visit Weavy Docs.
