Introduction
Skylight is the fastest way to build scalable enterprise apps for wearable, augmented reality, and mobile devices. Using low-code development tools, a robust set of platform features, and quick start apps for common use cases, you can quickly develop, deploy, and manage apps that are tailored to your organization’s specific needs and integrate with enterprise systems.
Skylight applications are designed for a specific use case using Skylight Application Builder and run on supported devices through a Skylight client app.
A Skylight application consists of:
- Views that contain cards that are presented to end users and make up the application's user experience.
- Logic that responds to user inputs and system events to perform actions, as well as logic that binds the views and cards to changes in the data source.
- Roles and permissions that define what users can and cannot do while interacting with the application.
- Static media (documents, images, video, or audio) that supports the workflow of the application.
- Application data that remains the same throughout the life of an application.
These components are created using Skylight Application Builder. Skylight also provides tools for managing change control and a publishing mechanism for managing the distribution of applications to users within your organization. Once published, applications are automatically downloaded to the client(s) of Skylight users that you have granted access.
Unlike native mobile applications, Skylight applications are not compiled and installed on the operating system of a device. Rather, a single Skylight client app is installed. The application definitions are then downloaded to and interpreted by the Skylight client, ensuring that the user experience and functionality is optimized according to the type of device being used.
This approach allows you to easily leverage platform features provided by Skylight and focus on the business logic of your application, without the need to build an entire application from the ground-up. In addition, using a single application, you can deploy to multiple different device types.
Skylight clients are available for the following devices:
- Glass Enterprise Edition 2
- RealWear HMT-1 (beta)
- Vuzix M400
- iOS smartphones and tablets
- Web browsers (Google Chrome)
Work sessions (or sessions) are unique instances of work that are assigned to users and are made up of data-focused events generated from user or API interactions. Typically, a single session is associated with a single execution of a procedure, inspection, pick walk, or support ticket.
Sessions may include multiple users, known as participants. Application roles can be used to grant or limit users' capabilities in interacting with sessions.
A session also includes session data, which is where all of the data for the session is stored. Every update to the session data is tracked and automatically synchronized between all participants of the session and each of their devices. This means users can handoff between devices and pickup where they left off and multiple users can work on the same session in parallel.
While the session data itself is mutable, the individual update events are immutable and act as an audit trail for the history of the session. In other words, the entire history of events that occur in a session (i.e. media captures, step completion, text input, call participants) are recorded and can be recalled later.
While applications can be self-contained, they can also consume and write back data from external resources using Skylight's Integration APIs. The APIs rely on standard technologies such as REST over HTTP and MQTT. In addition, Upskill provides SDKs for popular languages that abstract the APIs.
Using the APIs you can push data into work session data that is data bound to and display in the application user interface. You can also write back data stored to the work session that was captured as a part of the application flow.
Skylight Application Builder is a low-code development environment for creating Skylight applications for wearable and mobile devices.
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The general development flow is as follows:
- 1.Design your UI - Create views and drag-and-drop cards to construct user interfaces that are optimized for both wearable and mobile devices.
- 2.Data bind UI components - Map UI properties to objects in application, session, or local data. Once deployed on a client, when the underlying data changes, the UI element will automatically update with the new value.
- 3.Add custom logic - Customize the application’s behavior using data binding template expressions or event scripts for card, view, and application events
- 4.Preview and test - Quickly preview applications in a web client or on a device and use the session inspector tool to monitor and simulate session data changes.
The application dashboard is a portal for managing applications.
Using the application dashboard you can:
- Configure permissions - Assign users and groups to roles to control application access. Use the default roles or create custom roles with customizable permission schemes.
- Track versions - View a history of application versions and if needed restore from an older version.
- Publish to users - Edit applications in a draft state without affecting production. Once all changes are final, you can publish to make it available to all users.
- Manage sessions - View a detailed log of all sessions and session events for an application. Create and close sessions from the web.
- Export and import - Fully export applications as a package that can be imported into other Skylight domains.
Note: Smart glasses or mobile devices are not required for development. You can immediately get started with Application Builder and deploy to the Skylight web client.
Last modified 2yr ago