Projects

Any kind of development with IBM Industry Solutions Workbench is organized in projects. Solution Designer supports in general two different types of projects:

• Service Projects: Represents a single microservice modelled and implemented by the user which can be used as component for an application composition project

• Application Composition Project: Used to compose applications comprised of multiple components

The Projects page in Solution Designer provides an overview of both types, so you have quick access to all projects no matter if you want to compose an application or model a microservice.

When talking about the design process, it's mostly about modelling a low-code project. This project type supports designing all elements of the component in a Design2code (low-code) way. Solution Designer lets you model all parts in a structured and organized way, offers rich documentation possibilities for most of these elements with e.g., auto-generated UML diagrams to visualize the design model. Although there is full support for code generation and the generated source code can be run immediately, you will still have to write the business logic code to get the component solving the business problem.

Designing and implementing will be explained in the chapter Low-code Service Projects.

Instead pro-code projects give you full flexibility and control in regard of how you design and implement the project. You can easily re-use organization best practices, cross-cutting functionality as well as use-case-specific code-frameworks While you are free in design and implementation the features like the integrated developer documentation or pre-defined build and deploy pipelines are available for this type of projects as well.

The implementation will be explained in the chapter Pro-code Service Projects.

The main purpose of this project type is to compose applications based on already existing, reusable components. An application is just a representation of deployment instructions and configurations for multiple components that will get deployed together, but there is no source code as there is in service projects.

See Managing Applications for further information.