FlockOS, which is touted to be the world’s first chat operating system, is largely based on open source technologies. Starting from HTML, CSS and JavaScript, to JVM, MongoDB and MySQL, the platform has a vast number of community solutions to enable real-time communication.
‘‘Open source technologies have played an instrumental role in the evolution of FlockOS,” says Bhavin Turakhia, CEO and founder of Flock. Thirty-seven-year-old Turakhia is renowned for his successful startup innovations in the Indian business landscape with ventures such as Radix, CodeChef Zeta, Ringo and team messenger platform Flock, chose open source to make FlockOS a standout offering.
In order to ensure developers build customised apps, bots and integrations on Flock, the product team designed the concept of FlockOS. FlockOS helps developers build workspace apps that can be used within Flock, the messaging and collaboration tool.
Apps as first-class citizens
While Flock is supported across all leading platforms — including Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and the Web, its FlockOS requires a standalone platform to allow apps to blend seamlessly with the native Flock experience.
“We wanted to build a platform that is extremely powerful, and where apps are treated as first-class citizens. To achieve both the goals, we needed to allow app developers to extend the capabilities of Flock in such a way, that they could show their own customised UI inside it,” explains Chaitanya Gupta, chief technology officer, Flock.
Gupta and his small team of engineers initially searched for a framework that could work across platforms. Eventually, the development squad realised that the best fit for fast moving business teams were the Web technologies.
“The model we finally settled on was to use iframes on the desktop and the Web, and Web views on the mobile to present an app’s user interface. We also had to work out how the Flock client cloud communicated with the app’s interface and vice versa,” Gupta tells Open Source For You.
This story is from the August 2017 edition of Open Source For You.
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This story is from the August 2017 edition of Open Source For You.
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