Getting Started with App Platform
Welcome to the App Platform development tutorial! The App Platform is Gladly’s system for integrations — tools to bring external data into Gladly, and to provide Gladly automation, AI, and eventually human Agents with Actions that interact with external systems.
In this series of articles, we will go over the process to build a sample App. For more general information about App Platform, you can check out our Overview.
Building an App
The goal of this tutorial is to walk you, a software developer, through the process of building an App Platform App. Starting from scratch, we will work through installing the CLI tool, planning the structure of our App, building out Actions and Data Pulls, and installing our new App in a Gladly instance. The App we build will integrate an example order management system, to bring Customer transaction data into Gladly automation and provide Actions to interact with Customer orders in an external system.
Before You Start
Prerequisite Knowledge
This tutorial series assumes some knowledge of basic software development principles and HTTP requests. In addition, there are a few technologies used heavily in App Platform that are good to be familiar with:
Go Templating Language, extended with Sprig
This Tutorial Will Provide Examples
You do not have to be an expert with these technologies! We will do our best over the course of the tutorial to provide code examples, and the goal is that by the end you will be ready to start building your own App Platform App. However, if you are totally unfamiliar with either GraphQL or Go Templates, we recommend taking a little a time to look over the linked resources above, so that you will be better able to absorb the information presented here.
Our Sample External Data
In this tutorial, we will be building an App to interact with an order management system, or “OMS”. This is a typical use case for the App Platform, and is designed to closely mirror the needs of many organizations who will want to build their own App to bring external data and actions into Gladly.
In addition to the core technologies, now is a good time to take a look over our Example OMS. As we will interacting with the Example OMS for every Action and Data Pull, it helps to have a working understanding of how the authentication works, the kinds of endpoints that exist in the Example OMS API, and how the Example OMS handles data generation and caching.
Moving On: Installing the App Platform CLI Tool
Now that you are familiar with the prerequisite knowledge and the data we will be working with, let’s move onto installing the App Platform CLI tool, appcfg .