Eclipse OpenSmartCLIDE

The main objective of Eclipse OpenSmartCLIDE is to propose a radically new smart cloud-native development environment, based on the coding-by-demonstration principle, that will support creators of cloud services in the discovery, creation, composition, testing, and deployment of full-stack data-centered services and applications in the cloud. OpenSmartCLIDE will provide high levels of abstraction at all stages (development, testing, deployment, and run-time) as well as self-discovery of IaaS and SaaS Services.

OpenSmartCLIDE provides several categories of abstractions:

• at development stage, OpenSmartCLIDE provides abstractions on data transformations or processing;
• at testing stage, mechanisms to visualize flow and status or artifacts to automatically test the expected behavior;
• at deployment stage, abstractions of physical and virtual resources;
• or at runtime, mechanisms to monitor the performance and operation of the service.

The cloud nature of the environment will enable collaboration between different stakeholders, and the self-discovery of IaaS and SaaS services and the high levels of abstraction will facilitate the composition and deployment of new services to nontechnical staff (with no previous experience on programming or on the administration of systems and infrastructure). Equally, hiding the complexity of the infrastructure, and adding intelligence to this layer, will allow selecting the most adequate infrastructure services in each moment.

OpenSmartCLIDE allows SMEs and Public Administration to boost the adoption of Cloud solutions, being validated at one solution-oriented to Public Administration (Social Security System) and three different IoT products of software development SMEs within the consortium.

Benefits of SmartCLIDE for the targeted users

The aim of SmartCLIDE is to provide a tool to empower end-users with limited technical knowledge in the specification, development, testing, deployment, and operation of data-intensive applications in the cloud. SmartCLIDE introduces several benefits for the different stakeholders within the service creation lifecycle:

• It lowers the entry-level to programming activities to non-technical staff: OpenSmartCLIDE will allow end-users to easily prototype features (that can be enhanced later on by developers). It also provides a powerful training tool for novel developers to understand the underlying mechanisms of data-intensive applications
• Increase the reusability of services: OpenSmartCLIDE will allow reusing existing and ad-hoc created microservices, data, control structures, or operations abstractions.
• Improvement of the transparency, readability, and comprehensibility of software: OpenSmartCLIDE implements several features that will improve the readability and comprehensibility of software:
  • it implements the coding-by-demonstration principle, which is a way of creating software that is closer to the way humans think. Rather than adapting the users’ mental scheme to the requirements of a programming language, it’s the user who instructs a system to reach the desired result making use of abstractions.
  • it implements control flow monitoring at run-time (even at low levels of granularity), which improves the knowledge about how the software works and interacts with different components and sub-systems.
  • it implements a stateful behavior, showing the state of data (and variables) at each execution step.
• Increase quality and security levels: At design time, when the user defines the output of the program, she makes use of domain-specific languages like Gherkin, which will enable the full automation of acceptance tests making use of natural language. OpenSmartCLIDE will also make available full abstractions of other testing frameworks at testing stage, enabling coders to deploy containers with testing frameworks for testing purposes in seconds
• Increase productivity levels: Improved reusability, higher comprehension of the underlying mechanisms of soft-ware, and full control over the lifecycle (from specification to deployment) will boost the productivity of development teams, even in the most complex contexts.