The development workflow for micro web applications involves combined efforts of multiple teams from both the partner and EGYM. Overall, it can be decomposed into following phases:
Gathering requirements, planning and validation of the technical solution. Before starting development it is crucial to define the scope and functionality provided by the web application, clarify technical aspects and integration points between partner and EGYM systems. This phase will require joined efforts from partner and EGYM product and engineering teams
Designing user interface, layout, and overall look and feel of the application. This phase might require involvement of the EGYM design team to create wireframes, user flow diagrams and provide guidelines on how particular web feature can be integrated into the EGYM mobile application
Application development. During this phase the partner engineering team will implement the functionality of the web application according to the defined scope, architecture and design. In order to accelerate development speed and simplify integration testing, EGYM engineering will provide the partner access to the Ionic Appflow Dashboard, and will assist with configuring CI & deployment pipelines
Deployment and end-to-end testing. Once stable application builds are available for testing, EGYM engineering team will assemble them into mobile application, apply required configuration to enable web application inside mobile app and provide mobile app builds to partner for further testing
Production release and updates. Once the application passes the testing phase it becomes applicable for release to the production environment. Production releases and post-release updates are handled by the partner team according to recommendations documented in dedicated sections - Release Workflow and Application Upgrade Policies.
Ionic Appflow is an important part of the MWA development flow that provides capabilities for assembling web application builds, deploying them to dedicated distribution channels and delivering builds to target mobile devices through Live Updates.
In order to integrate web applications with Appflow, it is necessary to create a new project in the Appflow Dashboard and connect the application git repository. This setup is performed once for each micro web application and is done by EGYM engineering.
After configuring the Appflow project, the partner engineering team receives access to the project and can create additional distribution channels and deploy application builds to Live Updates. The deployment process is straightforward and is covered in detail in the official Appflow documentation.