SDK Harmonisation and Updates
New Features:
- Intro
- Background Sync
- SDK Harmonisation
- Enhanced Error Handling
- Improved Documentation
- Improved Developer Comms Process
- Improved Support Process
We are excited to share the latest and greatest version of the digi.me SDKs. Over the last few months we have been listening quite carefully to our developer community to understand your pain points when using our SDKs. We both heard and felt your pain! This release is all about removing that pain and making it easier to work with us, easier to debug and handle errors and easier to get the data you want when you want it! We have even made it fully Java compatible and built it for Kotlin. What more could you possibly need…. (Dare I ask…)
Background Sync
Background sync is a new feature of the digi.me service that delivers data to a 3rd party app whilst it is being synced to the user’s account. This greatly speeds up the delivery time of newly synced data. This is a massive improvement when the user is on-boarding. If the user has already synced their data, they will not feel much of a difference. However for new users syncing their data is so much faster! And best of all, to get it you just need to be using the new SDK to get this feature.
SDK Harmonisation
With all that in mind here’s the details of the changes to the SDKs. Firstly all the SDK calls have been normalised across the platforms. The names of the functions are now consistent. The only variants are in the platform-based syntax. This means that whatever platform you are coding to you can easily switch between them and find your way around our SDK. You no longer need an SDK translator to work out what is what! 😉 Whilst the Android SDK has pretty much been rewritten the iOS SDK and JS SDK have both been more subtle changes. The full details on the change are documented in our migration documents.
Enhanced Error Handling
We went a bit further than just the naming conventions and function calls to also normalise the error handling across the platforms. We have created more structure to the way we handle our errors so that you can understand where the error has occurred. Be that in your own code, in our SDK or in our back-end system processes. This should make it a LOT easier for you to determine whether you need to debug on your end, check the process workflow that you have invoked or raise a ticket with our support team and have someone investigate the issue.
Improved Documentation
Documentation has also had a major overhaul. With the simplification of the SDK has come some sensible changes to the way that we document the SDK across all platforms. The documentation has also been normalised and made more concise and easier to understand. We know there are likely still some documents that you would like to have that may not yet be available but if there is something that would make your lives easier all you need to do is ask. We have also produced migration guides for each of our platforms to help support you moving your existing apps to the new SDK. Whilst there appears to be quite a few changes all in one go, in fact there are relatively few changes that you will need to make to your code in order to move across to the new platform.
Android developers will be very pleased to hear that the new SDK is already proving to be a lot more reliable and stable than the previous version. And we look forward to hearing how our JS and iOS developers find the experience as well.
Improved Comms Process
Moving forward we will be updating you on a more regular basis about the upcoming changes, deprecated calls and enhanced features that are being released with our SDKs. We know what it’s like to try and work with ever moving targets with SDKs so we understand how important it is for you to have visibility of what is to come.
Improved Support Process
Previously in order to get developer support you had to drop a message on Slack and hope that one of our dev team would pick up your query and run with it. This has worked pretty successfully to some degree but isn’t so easy to track and provided you with detailed fix information and broader support to the rest of the developer community. As such we are now using Freshdesk to capture and pull developer support requests into our formal process. This way we can assign the correct developers to the bugs quicker and have all the information to hand without as much back and forth.
Let us know how you get on.
If you aren’t already on our Slack channel please join us there. We love hearing from you about your projects and apps. You will find all sorts of projects that you may want to get involved in. The latest open source project that was shared in our developer community was one by Edge Consulting. It is a ReactNative Android project. If you would like to get involved in this and other projects keep an eye out on Slack. And remember to share your own projects with the community.
We will be showcasing the best of the apps regularly with our wider digi.me community.
Let’s make your app one of them!
Sarah & The Dev Team