Today we’re proud to announce that Weavy X is officially out of beta and available to the public. Weavy X, which our developer team has internally been calling Weavy 10, marks the biggest update in the history of our in-app collaboration API and SDK. The work we’ve done will yield benefits for new and existing users, but will also yield huge benefits for our developer community.
Every version of Weavy up to now and including Weavy 8.x has been the product of incremental updates built on our legacy code going back to when Weavy was an add-on for Microsoft Dynamics 365. While our legacy code has served us well and we will continue to support it, there were serious limitations to the underlying framework that we couldn’t ignore. With our 10 release, we’ve chosen to start fresh and rebuild everything backend to frontend so that any developer can add our features to their app, regardless of framework. Weavy is now more nimble, requires less server loads, and is more embeddable across the large variety of platforms and frameworks.
Weavy X is now built with .NET Core and that gives us the flexibility to address the changing landscape of app and platform development. Moving to .NET Core allows the backend to run on any platform: Windows, Linux, macOS. It also allows us to leverage Docker containers. Look for the forthcoming release of the new version of our backend in a few weeks, which will support cross-platform hosting.
No matter how you host the Weavy backend, be it AWS, Azure, weavy.io, or on-premise, you can now easily set up, configure, and continue the bulk of your work on the frontend.
But we’ve long acknowledged that self-hosting isn’t for everyone. Many developers have given us the feedback that they want to focus more on the frontend without having to worry about the backend at all. So we listened and have reimagined the backend to behave as a true cloud solution, with configuration options and a rich Rest API that moves our customization options to the frontend. No matter how you host the Weavy backend, be it AWS, Azure, weavy.io, or on-premise, you can now easily set up, configure, and continue the bulk of your work on the frontend.
For our frontend we still offer our popular Drop-in UI, which is built to work in any framework, but now with new optimizations to minimize our footprint and make our load times blazing fast. We’re also introducing UI Kits for all major frameworks, meaning developers will have access to native components for React, React Native, and more that can be directly used in their project.
We’re doubling down on our commitment to Open Source so developers can make our UI their own and use it however they please.
This means for the first time Weavy will be truly and fully natively embeddable anywhere, with the smallest possible footprint and little to no impact on your development resources. All of our UIs, including the Drop-in UI, is now being released as Open Source under the MIT license. We’re doubling down on our commitment to Open Source so developers can make our UI their own and use it however they please.
With Weavy X, we gave our developers a challenge: make a product that any developer at any skill level, working in any environment, could get up and running with the least possible effort. That meant not only changing how Weavy was built but also how we distribute it. That’s why starting with Weavy X, all future versions of our backend and frontend will be published in the NuGet Gallery. Additionally, our UI Kits and Drop-in UI will be published as npm packages. We’re working really hard to be where developers work, regardless of IDE and environment.
We at Weavy are firm believers that the future of app development is low-code, and we've long prided ourselves on how easy it is to integrate Weavy's features with only a few lines of code. One of our tag lines has been "deploy in weeks, not months." and today we can confidently say that developers can get Weavy up and running in an app in a matter of minutes, and fully deployed live in a few days.
Get Weavy up and running in an app in a matter of minutes, and fully deployed live in a few days.
One of the top questions our team is asked each week is “does Weavy offer hosting for the backend?” Well, today we’re excited to announce that the answer is a resounding yes, and we think we’ve come up with the perfect price for our hosting services: free.
Launching alongside Weavy X is weavy.io: a cloud where we host the Weavy backend. Every weavy.io instance is isolated meaning nothing is shared and developers can be assured that their data is secure. We’re not removing the ability to self-host, and any developer using weavy.io is free to move their backend to their own infrastructure without any feature or data loss.
Launching alongside Weavy X is weavy.io: a cloud where we host the Weavy backend.
Anyone using Weavy X can now take full advantage of weavy.io, with no additional cost regardless of whether they’re using a free or paid tier of Weavy.
We’re beginning our rollout of Weavy X with version 10: a fully functional and feature-complete rebuild of our backend and frontend, the latest version of our Drop-in UI, and weavy.io, our new free hosting service.
Not now, we always recommend waiting to do any major changes in a production environment. But, rest assured: there are no plans to cease supporting and maintaining our Weavy 8.x, we’re committed to giving all Weavy developers the best possible experience regardless of which version they choose to develop with.
