Extensions

We have re-worked the extensions feature. The documentation below shows what will be available with the next release v88 - Almost forever

Extensions - as the name indicates - bring more functionality into the Heisenware platform.

There are two types of extensions:

1. Heisenware made, ready-to-use

2. Custom made by use, able to carry whatever functionality you require

The extensions menu pops out under the puzzle icon

Heisenware made

Currently we offer three extensions:

1. Industrial Blockchain

2. RAG AI

3. Process Simulations

All those extensions run - once installed - along with the other functionality as part of the cloud platform and can be used as usual.

Custom made

This is a very powerful feature and allows you to extend the Heisenware platform to your specific needs.

In essence, we provide you with a project setup into which you can add your custom functionality in a completely non-intrusive fashion. Using the power of our VRPC library under the hood you can write any valid Node.js code (yes - no APIs nothing, just your code) and make it ready for low-coding in minutes.

We are actively working on having the same idea ready for C++ and Python, stay tuned!

The best place to start is by looking at our docker-extension-starter-js. Actually, we recommend downloading this project as a scaffold for you to change it to your needs and place it under your own software versioning.

What you end up doing is creating a docker image whose containers nicely integrate into the platform in one of two possible ways:

Running in the cloud

Once your docker image is build, pushed and publicly accessible (contact us for private registry support) you can easily load it as a Custom Extension

Once installed and given you code is syntactically correct, it immediately appears in the Functionality tree view. Simply install it again if you have a new version (even works with same label) to be applied.

Any instances you create will be automatically persisted and restarted. You will find them in the Resources under extensions/my-extension/...

Running on your premises

This is very powerful feature. It allows you to run you custom code on-premises but automatically, seamlessly and securely bridged into the cloud by us. In order to do that, you simply start a container of the image you created locally and configure it with the correct credentials using environmental variables.

docker run -it \
-e HW_DOMAIN=<account>.<workspace> \
-e HW_BROKER=mqtts:\\<account>.heisenware.cloud \
-e HW_USERNAME=<username> \
-e HW_PASSWORD=<password> \
myusername\myimage:1.0.0

In order to retrieve a valid username and password, add a VRPC Integration in the App Manager.

Example

For an account named my-company, an integration with username agentRunner and a password called secret the call would be:

docker run -it \
-e HW_DOMAIN=my-company.default \
-e HW_BROKER=mqtts:\\my-company.heisenware.cloud \
-e HW_USERNAME=agentRunner \
-e HW_PASSWORD=secret \
myusername\myimage:1.0.0

When everything was setup up correctly, you should see something like this on your console: