Developing solutions

IBM Financial Services Workbench provides collaborative tools that enable business analysts, developers, architects and operations teams to work together faster.

It empowers developers in collaboration with subject-matter experts to focus on the core business logic of their solutions – and not loosing themselves in finding the right technology or connecting to a database. This results in a high developer productivity. IBM Financial Services Workbench provides a model—driven Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach. Development is supported, guided, fast and easy.

Within low-code projects, the methodology of Domain Driven Design helps to focus on the business challenges and to solve the complex challenges. Cloud native skills are not necessarily needed to build services, that run on OpenShift. Not only full-stack developers, but also “traditional” developers can drive your innovation on various stacks. But low-code development is not the only way to develop solutions and to build your business capability map. You also have the option to use pro-code development in case you have special demands, or you want to give the maximum in freedom and flexibility to your cloud native experts.

IBM Financial Services Workbench covers the whole lifecycle of applications based on modern microservice architecture principles from design to day2 operations.

Support for collaborative, effective solution design

IBM Financial Services Workbench helps you to transform business requirements into concrete design based on proven patterns and experiences embedded in reference architecture. It offers support for collaborative design across service- and domain-boundaries. Within low-code projects Domain Driven Design artefacts from Event-Storming Workshops can easily be transferred. Rich documentation capabilities, like auto-drawn diagrams, are equally helping business analysts and developers to understand the subject. Pro-code projects also provide collaborative development by offering rich documentation features to share ideas and requirements between the business expert and the development team.

Implement business logic according to the design model

The logic for the real business service can be implemented in various languages. Within low-code projects the code generation speeds up the implementation and frees developers from tasks, like connecting to the underlying infrastructure. It ensures the consistency between the design model and the current implementation. Generated testing stubs help to ensure the quality of the implementation code.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

Based on standards (OpenShift pipelines) and years of experience, IBM Financial Services Workbench provides one-click-configured pipelines to release services as components. Although the pipelines are pre-defined they can be easily adopted to customer needs.

Developing solutions with IBM Financial Services Workbench follows a certain workflow. It all starts and ends with applications in form of Application Composition Projects. This project type is used to compose applications by adding ready-to-use components and applying configuration.

Every application consists of multiple reusable components that are managed in a component repository. You can build your own components or (re-)use from a variety of built-in or 3rd party components. If you decide to build your own components, you can choose between low-code and pro-code development depending on your resources and project demands. Next, you choose a stack and an implementation language and there you go.

But application composition is more than just building components and putting them together. You also have access to two additional sources, the framework components (built-in) and external components (3rd party). This provides you with additional business capabilities that you can add to your next application to innovate even faster and with less risk.

10 steps to build an application:

1. Start with creating an Application Composition project

2. Add existing component(s) from the Component Repository

3. Configure these components to your needs

4. Create Planned Component(s) in case there is no suitable component

5. Create Service project(s) for each of the planned components

6. Design and implement these service projects

7. Release them to make them available as components

8. Replace planned components with the new components

9. Define one or more deployment targets for your application

10. Configure and deploy your application to one or more deployment targets

Read more about working with projects