Development, Operation and Sales Process

The end-to-end process that generally applies to developing your application, operations and providing it to others can be illustrated as follows:

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In order to make your application commercially available, the following steps must generally be taken.

Developers' perspective

  1. Subscribe to Developer Services (as included in a MindAccess Developer Plan or certain MindSphere Capability Packages)

    • For Cloud Foundry applications:

      Subscribe to the Cloud Foundry Hosting Add-on additionally to the Developer Services in order to be provided with an access to the Cloud Foundry.

    • For self-hosted applications:

      Subscribing to the Developer Services you will be able to develop and test your self-hosted applications.

  2. Configure your hosting environment.

    • MindSphere-managed hosting

      Use Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface or a tool of your choice to prepare your hosting space.

      Configure Cloud Foundry as well as separately ordered or included Backing Services like additional data stores or message queues.

    • Self-managed hosting

      Configure and use your hosting environment according to your needs and specifications (including technical requirements for mobile device operating systems), possibly provided by the vendor of the environment.

  3. Develop your application.

    • According to your needs, create a local development environment by installing appropriate software tools.

    • Use the Developer Documentation to see how to create an application.

    • Use MindSphere API Reference and API Guide for information on how to make API calls.

    • Create your application.

  4. Test and evaluate your application using the Development Environment (or Developer Tenant) or Test Environments (only included in certain MindSphere Capability Packages).

    • Register your application as described in the Developer Documentation..

      Test and evaluate your application as to its technology, functionality, performance,security and user interface with regard to expected content and behavior.

    • Use tools and processes to manage application testing.

Operators' perspective

  1. Subscribe to Operator Services (as included in a MindAccess Operator Plan or certain MindSphere Capability Packages).

    • For Cloud Foundry applications:

      Subscribe to the Cloud Foundry Hosting Addon (only relevant for MindSphere Capability Packages) additionally to the Operator Services in order to be provided with an access to the Cloud Foundry.

    • For self-hosted applications:

      Subscribing to the Operator Services you will be able to operate and sell your self-hosted applications.

  2. Prepare access to your application.

    For productive purposes you shall use the Productive Environment in connection with your application. Therefore, you shall follow the respective process for Cloud Foundry and self-hosted applications.

    • An operator is able to deploy the application in the production environment using the Operator Cockpit.

    • The Operator Cockpit provides mechanism to onboard the application into the Store. You can find comprehensive information about the selling of applications in the Seller Guide.

    • Finally, an operator can allow access to the application by using the Operator Cockpit.

  3. Operate and use your application

    • When the operated application is interactive, you may access this application on the Launchpad of your Account on the Productive Environment (except for mobile native applications). Applications of the type plugin (or sometimes also referred to as extension) may be accessed within the application in which they are integrated.

    • Conduct continuous monitoring to maintain health of your application.

    • Keep your application up-to-date (e.g. open source software, latest buildpacks for Java and Node.js in Cloud Foundry, updates on Backing Services).

Seller's perspective

  1. Subscribe to Operator and/or Developer Services (as included in a MindAccess Developer Plan and/or MindAccess Operator Plan or certain MindSphere Capability Packages): Deploy your application.

  2. Register your application.

  3. Enter the publishing data into the Operator Cockpit.

  4. Submit content via Operator Cockpit to MindSphere Store.

  5. Publish your application via the MindSphere Store.