Progress Releases Kinvey Studio

We're excited to release Kinvey Studio. Check out the official debut of our low-code, high productivity tool, designed to help professional developers build apps faster while keeping full control over the code.

Progress is proud to announce the first official release of the newest member of the Progress Kinvey platform. Kinvey Studio is a low-code tool enabling professional developers to quickly and effortlessly build and maintain engaging modern apps. It enhances the mature Kinvey backend to create a compelling platform for web, mobile, and chat apps.

Where the Market Is

When we talked to our customers and partners, we identified that the relationships between companies and their users are changing. With the cloud technologies and instant, always present access to information, consumers now demand to be able to get their job done when and how they feel the best.

This demand creates huge pressure on developers. There’s a huge backlog of apps to write, maintain, and extend. End users require fluid UX, new approaches to accessing content like AR, and data to be always available. Apps themselves explode in complexity, both on the backend and frontend. And every medium—web, Android, iOS, and cloud backend—requires specific skills and tools, which are not shared among team members.

Delivering on time, within budget, and with the fewest defects possible is a difficult target to hit. We have an opportunity to innovate and solve these growing issues.

Kinvey is Expanding

Progress already offers a leading low-code cloud backend as part of the Kinvey platform. Using its industry-leading data connectors, you can expose relational and cloud data providers to your apps. It already takes care of scaling your backend code, authenticating your users against your enterprise or social auth providers (including biometric auth), and all other infrastructure around building modern apps.

What was missing was a tool to enable professional developers to write the client apps—be they web, mobile, or conversational.

What is Kinvey Studio

Kinvey Studio is this missing link. It is a visual, low-code, rapid development environment, which couples with the existing Kinvey backend to deliver this fast and efficient workflow for the developers.

When we designed Kinvey Studio, we settled on two key principles:

• Professional developers need full control over the code produced by their tools. Kinvey Studio generates clean and maintainable source code and integrates with the existing tools developers already use—it augments existing tools and processes instead of displacing them.
• Use wildly successful, open source technologies. This enables the code and skill sharing which developer teams need to be successful. We settled on JavaScript with its huge ecosystem, and more specifically Angular, NativeScript, and Kendo UI.

Using Kinvey Studio, you can quickly create beautiful mobile and web apps, integrate chat bots, and connect your users to the data they need. The code generated by the tool is clean, maintainable and can interoperate with all the leading tools in the market, like Visual Studio Code and Git.

This is a sample app which I created without any coding in just a few minutes:

What's New in the Official Kinvey Studio Release

The team released a preview version of Kinvey Studio few weeks ago. Since then, we concentrated our efforts on polishing and stabilization. We listened to the feedback of our early adopters and fixed key scenarios. The changes are too numerous to include them all here, but some of the highlights in version 1.0 include:

• Significantly improved project creation times by moving heavy work to the background
• Greatly improved the quality of the generated app code. We also make sure there are no red squishy error lines in Visual Studio Code when you open the generated app
• Add more list templates as mobile views
• Automatically regenerate the app when you save it. This makes sure that the UI and on-disk code is always in sync and preview on devices and in the web shows the latest changes
• Now, when you create a new view, you can put it in the correct navigation hierarchy. Previously this required a separate step after creating the view

The Future of Kinvey Studio

This release is but a first step in a journey. Kinvey Studio, being a part of Kinvey Platform, is delivered as a service. We will enhance and expand it with new features all the time. Just to give you a sample of what we're planning—we will add more widgets, more components, and more options for styling your apps. We are also working on some bigger features, but we need more time to fully bake them before showing to the world.

Create Faster Apps Today

Kinvey Studio is integral part of the Kinvey platform. You can download it and start creating apps today completely free right at the link below. 

Try Kinvey Studio