Remain Unifies Its Products with New Framework, Dubbed ‘Octo’
March 16, 2022 Alex Woodie
The folks at Remain Software have been cranking out the code all winter, and the fruits of their labor are now here for all to view. Chief among the new deliverables is Octo, which the Dutch company describes as a Web-based orchestration layer and framework that will unite its various products and provide a common dashboard. Updates of other products, including the flagship TD/OMS offering, are now available, too.
The headliner for Remain Software’s second milestone delivery of the current release cycle (which spans from summer to summer) arguably is Octo. Short for Open Core for Technology Orchestration, Octo “is the framework that makes it possible to bind everything together,” Remain says in its press release.
Octo is currently in beta, and is a little bit buggy, per Remain’s warnings. You wouldn’t want to rely on it for production systems just yet. But if you run Remain’s application lifecycle management (ALM) software, TD/OMS, along with its various other tools for IBM i developers (i.e., Gravity, API Studio, and MiWorkplace), you likely will run across the new product at some point. Octo also doesn’t have a lot of functionality just yet, but there is a plan to flesh the product out with additional capabilities in the future.
Octo is a new unifying framework and dashboard that works with all of Remain’s offerings.
So, what can you do with Octo? According to Remain, the first version of the product “brings TD/OMS to the web with essential work management, ratification, task and request linking.” It also brings a Web-based dashboard that allows users to visualize issues in their DevOps environment.
Octo brings a dashboard for TD/OMS that displays analytical information about the state of customers’ TD/OMS servers. “It will signal warnings like missing source and problematic transfers,” the company says on its Octo webpage. “It contains trend analysis charts to show how your DevOps is improving over time.”
For example, the dashboard will display information about the number of transfer failures, as well as plot those numbers over time, thereby giving the user a quick way to determine if the failures are increasing or decreasing. It also gives users a quick view into things like the status of various DevOps tasks and display task types per user, which can be useful information for development managers overseeing a team.
Octo brings additional features for TD/OMS on the work management front, including the ability to view all the tasks and requests in TD/OMS, to create task and request filters to narrow down the information displayed, as well as to ratify a task or request.
Remain has outfitted Octo with a Kanban tool “that shows tasks and assignments in an organized way, from to-dos, to work in progress, testing, and completed,” the company says. The Kanban interface allows users to move tasks from one column to another, to delete the tasks, and sort them too. Octo’s Kanban tool will be hooked up to TD/OMS with the milestone 3 release later this year, the company says. It will also be integrated with Gravity, its project and workflow management tool.
Remain is also shipping a new release of its flagship ALM tool for IBM i. In addition to the Octo features discussed above, TD/OMS version 14.0.2 brings integration for two new DevOps products: Azure DevOps and SonarQube. “Together with support for GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, this completes our strategy to support all major DevOps providers,” Remain says in its press release.
This release also brings the generation of Rest API using Mustache templates for GitHub; a new KPI dashboard; the capability to create new IFS objects; the capability to use the TFROBJOMS API to transfer objects without a user interface; the capability to perform actions using multi-selection; and about 50 other enhancements, the company says.
Gravity version 7.0.2, meanwhile, also brings several new features and enhancements, with the new Kanban board via Octo being the biggest piece of news. For more details on the new features in TD/OMS and Gravity, click here.
Remain has also been hard at work with MiWorkplace, the lightweight IDE for IBM i that it acquired and integrated with TD/OMS back in 2020. The IDE is designed primarily to deliver a better development experience for SEU users, not as a replacement for RDi.
With version 1.28, Remain has bolstered MiWorkplace with new compile commands for COBOL and SQL sources. It also has added prompting for all compile commands. Users will find the new release recovers better from flaky network connections, the company says, in addition to the ability to drill down into search results, to search with regular expressions, and the ability to compile directly from the editor. You can see this page for more information on the new release of MiWorkplace.
Finally, Remain has updated its API Studio, the tool it launched two years ago for creating, testing, and managing APIs on IBM i and other platforms.
With Remain API Studio version 3.0.2, the company has upgraded its old OpenAPI JSON/YAML editor with a new one that is better and more efficient, the company says. What’s more, the API Studio’s RPG generator “gives more control to the users, allowing them to influence how the code is generated, thanks to the use of Mustache templates,” the company says. It also has improved API validations. More info about API Studio 3.0.2 is available here.
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