Is the IDE Really Going Away?

I have been out of touch for a bit, and am getting back into all this.

As I was browsing around, looking for info for a current project, I noticed some comments here and there that made mention of the IDE going away.

What’s up with that?

Is it really going away?

If so, when…and WHY?

When it goes away, will we be given some other tool/s that we can use to do the same stuff we’ve been doing in there all these years?

Yes, because Groovy is going away. Last date I heard was by the end of 2021. There is supposed to be a replacement by then that offers similar functionality (minus Groovy coding obviously).

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We will get some tools, but smartthings has made it clear that they do not intend to continue hosting other people’s custom code in their cloud forever. They consider it to be a large source of the instability over the last couple of years.

We don’t yet know how they are going to handle hub connected devices, like zigbee and zwave. But for everything else, you can do pretty much whatever you want to, but you will connect to smartthings through the published API And you will host your own code to do so. Or you will be able to use the new rules API, which is a lot like webcore and much more advanced than what is in the basic app features.

Official announcement:

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OK, cool.
So…not time to panic and run around screaming quite yet, eh? lol

Taking into consideration development time, I think you can stay fresh for a few more years again :smile:

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I definitely wouldn’t count on that. :thinking: Samsung has shown throughout this process that they are happy to discontinue things before an adequate replacement is available, sometimes on what seems a fairly arbitrary calendar date. We were told many times that the Classic app wouldn’t be discontinued “until there was parity,” but it didn’t work out that way. :disappointed_relieved:

Since they’ve said the IDE will be going away sometime this year, that’s what I would expect.

Submitted with respect.

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Yes, you’re right, but I would hope that this time act in a different way than in the past, otherwise it means that they don’t deserve my attention.

I am optimistic, I hope not to become disillusioned.

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there is talk that if and when they do pull the IDE that only smartthings devices will be natively supported. that is w/o some kind of user-supported server to handle the 3rd party device code.

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I haven’t heard that, and if it were true, they would probably lose their Z wave hub certification. Every certified Z wave hub has to be able to issue basic commands to any certified Z wave end device, regardless of manufacturer. That’s sort of the whole point of zwave.

“Basic” has a very specific meaning in this context, it’s essentially on/off/dim for switches and accept an event report for sensors, but the hub Has to do that much or it’s not a certified Z wave hub.

The requirements for zigbee are a little more complicated because compatibility is at the profile level: they could wave their hands and say they have a proprietary zigbee profile and then they’d be OK with not supporting any other brand devices.

But for Z wave I think they have to at least provide what are now the generic stock DTHs.

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hmmmm i thought ST was getting out of the hardware business :slight_smile: :sunglasses:

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yes, the next couple of months are going to get very interesting

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I’ve been seeing for a while there is a new Webcore coming. Do we know what the state of development is or where to find it? Haven’t seen much on this since the 2019 SDC presentation

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There’s quite a bit on it now. It’s still in development, so there are more features yet to be added.

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And it has its own subcategory in the forum now:

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We should probably clarify between the Rules API and Webcore. The Rules API has made a lot of strides lately and is now the backend of Automations in the app. There’s also an ongoing beta for it running locally. BUT there has been no indication that Webcore has started any work to adapt it to the new APIs, whether that’s the Rules API or as an endpoint app using the SmartThings API.

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Are you sure about that? Ady already showed us a working example of WebCoRE running locally on the SmartThings hub using Rules API, and in those 2 years since, I’m pretty confident, as @ady624 is the father of WebCoRE and an extremely clever developer, he’s got to 80% parity, if not more.

That was a proof of concept for Samsung Developer Conference. Adrian no longer works on webcore since he works for SmartThings. The latest discussion on them making a new version is in their forum

SmartThings might build their own web based GUI for the Rules API, but I wouldn’t expect it to do everything that Webcore can

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Since Adrian was hired by SmartThings specifically for his efforts on WebCoRE, and the WebCoRE version he exhibited running locally on the SmartThings hub using the Rules API was created whilst he was an employee of SmartThings, I would say demonstrates that you don’t know as much about what’s going on at SmartThings as you portend to do.

ok buddy, think what you will.

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Custom groovy DTHs are generally implemented as hub connected devices regardless of the actual connection method, so the information they have released thus far isn’t that relevant for the hobbyist developer as the hurdles are pretty big (such as deploying your own oath 2 service).

Until they say what the deal is with hub connected devices the future of custom DTHs is completely up in the air.

The other problem is a lot of custom DTHs used groovy smartapps to login, create child devices, etc., and even if they provide us a way to build custom DTHs I’m not sure what the solution is for creating this sort of interface as they seem to be moving away from smartapps.

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I’m a little nervous asking this question but if I don’t I will never understand.

I am very much a novice and have only been playing with Webcore for the past year. I finally started to get a good understanding of it and have been able to build some pretty complex pistons. I’ve been reading up on the new rules API and it is quit intimidating. If I understand correctly, this will be where you build more complex rules (like in Webcore)?

Is this something a novice (that’s me) should try right now? Or wait until it’s released? Any tips, tricks or input for learning is very much appreciated!

Edit: I don’t know where to put this so I’m tacking on here. I emailed support a question that had something to do with the SmartLighting app. I received an email back very strongly stating that Smart apps and the IDE are not going away and asked where I had gotten that information. I referred them to this forum and told them to Google it. They had no idea.

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