Aptivi Development Toolkit (ADT) migration for our projects

In an earlier announcement, we have announced the existence of the Aptivi Development Toolkit (ADT) toolset that allows you to make your own build system for your projects using Python scripts.

Now, we are planning to roll it out to all our projects, starting from this week, with more projects being on the list, and the rollout is expected to be finished within two whole weeks.

Starting from this week (March 8th to 14th), we will gradually update the following projects to use the new build system:

• Textify
• Colorimetry
• VisualCard
• SpecProbe
• Magico

After those projects get updated, the remaining projects will have been updated by the end of the next week. This is necessary to find and fix the last of the bugs before the wider rollout.

Meanwhile, we have made the documentation for the toolkit available on our GitBook instance as you can see here. This documentation will be gradually expanded as we develop new versions and during the rollout period.

The toolkit is open source, and you can see its source code here, cloneable as a Git submodule.

#ADT #AptiviDevelopmentToolkit #news #Tech #Technology #update

Aptivi Development Toolkit (ADT) is now official!

Our earlier announcement talked about how we’ve finalized the development of the new toolkit and how it would replace the older script-based toolkit. We have stated that the older script-based toolkit suffered from the following problems:

• Maintenance burdens: The older toolkit raised maintenance concerns, since we have to make sure that the toolkit’s features work properly in both Windows and Unix by maintaining two shell types and keeping them in sync.
• Structure inconsistency: Users were required to provide a script file for each action on Windows, while they were required to provide functions that implement a specific action, all in one script, on Unix.
• Complex problems required complex solutions: Since the older script-based toolkit used batch files and Bash scripts, problems that were more complex required complex and potentially fragile solutions.
• Readability issues: The scripts suffer from readability issues, due to lots of variety needed for this toolkit to happen, such as argument processing for an action. This makes maintenance harder and more time consuming.

Today, we are very excited to announce that the all-new toolkit, Aptivi Development Toolkit (ADT), is now available!

This toolkit solves the above problems by using Python as the scripting language due to its coherence and efficiency. By making the implementation of vendor scripts easier and more readable, long-term maintenance is guaranteed. This careful study has resulted in a toolkit that allows you to implement complex problems more efficiently, while maintaining readability.

Here are some of the key features of how ADT will transform your development experience when working on projects:

• Python instead of shell scripts: We have advocated into using Python 3.x in the development toolkit as it’s available on all major platforms, such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. It also simplifies the way you implement your vendor scripts to reduce maintenance burden and to make your scripts more convenient to work with.
• Built-in report system: The development toolkit provides you an “internal report” facility that allows you to generate a report about your project to a text file either locally or on a remote SSH server. This lets you get extensive details about your projects effortlessly.
• Built-in basic Git integration: ADT also contains the Git integration, which allows you to perform some of the most common Git operations, including committing, pushing, and so on. This is not a drop-in replacement for Git and its command-line interface, as it only focuses on the basics.
• Conventional commits: The Git integration’s commits use conventional commits that we’ve described in our contribution guidelines. Alternatively, you can use the standard git commit command if you want to opt out from conventional commits.
• Cloneable as a Git submodule: ADT respects the old script-based toolkit’s goals by making it cloneable as a submodule to make the toolkit focus on only one project. This also allows you to maintain different revisions of ADT across different Git repositories.

To add ADT as a submodule to your project, use git submodule add https://github.com/Aptivi/tools.

Please note that you’ll have to obtain Python 3.10 or greater to be able to use this toolkit without any problems.

#ADT #Aptivi #AptiviDevelopmentToolkit #news #Tech #Technology #update

Aptivi Development Toolkit (ADT) availability announcement

Earlier, we have worked on the shell-based development toolkit that allowed users to build projects and applications more efficiently with the use of shell scripts. We were proud when we had released the toolkit under the tools repository in GitHub.

However, the problems that followed it, including inconsistency in the vendor scripts structure (one shell file for Linux and macOS vs. various batch files for Windows), and maintenance burdens, caused us to implement the second-generation development toolkit, which we’ll announce below.

Today, we are very excited to announce that the Aptivi Development Toolkit (ADT) implementation is now finally finished!

However, we are going to make this toolkit available shortly, as we are conducting further tests to the toolkit to ensure that it works as intended on multiple projects, such as our public projects. Without further ado, we’ll tell you about some of the key features of how ADT will transform your development experience when working on projects:

• Python instead of shell scripts: We have advocated into using Python 3.x in the development toolkit as it’s available on all major platforms, such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. It also simplifies the way you implement your vendor scripts to reduce maintenance burden and to make your scripts more convenient to work with.
• Built-in report system: The development toolkit provides you an “internal report” facility that allows you to generate a report about your project to a text file either locally or on a remote SSH server. This lets you get extensive details about your projects effortlessly.
• Built-in basic Git integration: ADT also contains the Git integration, which allows you to perform some of the most common Git operations, including committing, pushing, and so on. This is not a drop-in replacement for Git and its command-line interface, as it only focuses on the basics.
• Conventional commits: The Git integration’s commits use conventional commits that we’ve described in our contribution guidelines. Alternatively, you can use the standard git commit command if you want to opt out from conventional commits.
• Cloneable as a Git submodule: ADT respects the old script-based toolkit’s goals by making it cloneable as a submodule to make the toolkit focus on only one project. This also allows you to maintain different revisions of ADT across different Git repositories.

But, why Python? Why not C# in .NET? Because Python is a scripting language, while C# is more suited for applications. We are very grateful to explore new opportunities moving forward with the ADT toolkit!

The initial version will be released as a drop-in replacement for the script-based development toolkit, but you can still use the older toolkit under a new, archived branch.

Please note that you’ll have to obtain Python 3.10 or greater to be able to use this toolkit without any problems.

#ADT #AptiviDevelopmentToolkit #BuildSystem #news #Python #Tech #Technology #update