Crust Technology releases the first Low-Code Platform with Federated Cloud capabilities

Cork, Ireland, 22 December 2020.

Crust Technology, the leading open-source Low-Code Development platform and Salesforce alternative and the driving force behind the free and open-source project Corteza, is excited to announce a new major release: Corteza 2020.12. This release comes with many new features and improvements, and includes experimental support for record federation. As a result, this makes the Corteza platform the first open-source federated cloud solution for record sharing in the world.

New features and improvement in Corteza 2020.12

Open-source federated cloud features, funded by the European Commission.

In September 2020, Crust Technology announced funding by the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet initiative to deliver the Corteza platform as a federated cloud solution for record sharing.

After sharing videos of a Proof of Concept and Minimal Viable Product (MVP), this latest release now includes support for this exciting feature. Crust Technology’s development of Corteza Record Federation will not stop here. In future versions, we will add additional structure and data synchronisation protocols (e.g. gRPC, streaming) and formats. This will widen the list of possible candidates that Corteza can add to its Record Federation network.

New importing and exporting features

This release makes it easier to move to Corteza with a new central importing and exporting subsystem, named “Envoy”. This subsystem comes with capabilities to resolve conflicts, dependencies and take in various data formats.

Field value expressions

Fields in the Corteza Low-Code Platform are now more powerful. The new field value expressions feature let you define value expressions (similar to formula fields in Salesforce), custom sanitizers, and custom validators on any field type.

Value expressions allow you to calculate or generate a field value based on other field values.
Custom sanitizers enable you to clean up data in fields automatically, before the record is saved, like trimming spaces.
Custom validators allow you to build simple to complex field validations with custom error messages.

Other changes

Provisioning (based on Envoy) now allows full customization of content to be provisioned.
Frontend web applications can now be served directly from server (reduces number of containers).
Simplified architecture and internal cross-service comm (no more support for separated builds for system, messaging and compose).
Error creation and handling now allows more verbosity and detail in dev and production mode.
Cleanup codegen tools and unified all codegen under one package and single strategy.
Rewritten store (repository) layer for flexibility.
Add support for PostgreSQL and SQLite3.
Removed organizations data structures, references and (db) tables.
Moved from SQL based database migrations to code-based migrations.
Replace offset with key-based pagination.
Experimental support for SCIM protocol.

View the complete changelog.

How to install Corteza

You can follow the local setup instructions for a local development or demonstration instance of Corteza. If you are looking for setting up a live deployment, check out the extensive production setup instructions. If you have questions, you can engage with other community members in the messaging channels on the Corteza community server at https://latest.cortezaproject.org.