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. Extensions are based on docker technology. In fact, any extension must be a regular docker image.

There are two types of extensions:

1. Heisenware made ready-to-use, quality checked

2. Custom made, your Docker Custom Code Adapter 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 - inside the platform

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 anywhere - outside of the platform

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: