February 2021 Newsletter

Partner Go-Live announcements!

We’re excited to announce six Q2 Marketplace and Q2 Accelerator Partners have gone live! Q2 Marketplace and Q2 Accelerator give Financial Institutions (FI‘s) the power to quickly extend the Q2 platform, without custom development costs, through software created by cutting-edge partners. We’re proud of these programs’ continued growth. It shows our commitment to providing innovation and choices to FIs, and ultimately to account holders. If you want more information on how to add a partner application to the Q2 platform, please contact innovationstudio@Q2.com. Also, we have a Webinar coming up for Q2 Clients on March 9th to go over the Q2 Marketplace and what it means for FI’s. If you are interested in attending, please reach out through your Q2 Relationship Manager.

Caliper SDK Training by the numbers

We hosted our first Partner Developer students in this quarter’s SDK Training. Partners use the same Caliper SDK as our FI’s and internal teams. The training provides valuable information and practice for everyone who uses the Caliper SDK. For more information on the course and how to sign up your team for our next session, please visit the Q2Developer.com training page.

Tecton 1.0 announcement

Tecton released its first semver major version (1.0) this month. The new release drops existing deprecations and support for IE, which means extensions may need a refactor to take the upgrade. Please see the Tecton 1.0 Accouncement and Upgrade Guide by the creator of Tecton, Daniel Chappell, for more details. Because Tecton is backward compatible and because 1.0 contains no new features (only deprecations), all extensions can take the upgrade without requiring a UUX upgrade. We are targeting implementing the Tecton upgrade into the UUX platform for version 4.4.0.90. We will announce it here when it becomes available in the coming weeks.

Kafka Message Bus

Kafka message bus access and mocking is out of beta! This feature allows developers to build extensions that can pull messages off their Kafka message bus and perform tasks with said messages. Q2 has used Kafka internally for a long time, but we’ve not been able to give external developers access to their buses because they are hosted in our secure datacenter. With this feature, external developers can now mock the message bus and interact with it exactly as it would be in production.

There are so many benefits and use cases for a message bus.

Here are a few examples:

Example 1: An extension that puts support ticket messages on the bus, and then another extension that allows employees to read and respond. However, if you want the priority to increase if a certain threshold of tickets by having an emergency alert. Then, you can just create another service that reads off the bus and can send off the notifications as needed. Since this is an extension you have full control of when and why emergency notifications go out.

Example 2: Suppose you have an extension that needs to post the same data to multiple services. Instead of explicitly posting the data to each service you can put the data on the bus and have the services read off the bus. For example, if you have an account opening extension, and you have some relatively heavy work that needs to be done on the result through a job, and you also want to track the information to an extension that generates reports. This is one extension that needs to post data to multiple services and using the message bus can make your account opening extension incredibly efficient and flexible.

Want to get on the bus? You can find more details in the new Kafka doc. Also, drop us a line in a support ticket. We would love to see what you’re building and answer any questions you have about this new feature.

Custom Health Check!

Issues in Production are never fun for anyone. Worse, sometimes no one even knows there is an issue. Q2 has standardized health checks we run on all extensions, but they’re limited to just that: standard issues.

Enter custom health check. Custom health checks run custom logic every minute in production to ensure your code is working as intended. Custom health check extensions are great for regularly calling an external API that is required for your extension to operate properly. Get started with custom health checks here.

Ticket Creation Form

As the Caliper SDK community grows, the number of support questions and deployment requests grows with it. In order to improve our response quality and time, we’ve added some clarifying details to support ticket requests. Taking the extra time to provide our team with the necessary information upfront will allow us to better serve you.

That said, we’re not fans of long forms with unnecessary fields. Our top priority when implementing the form was limiting and tailoring questions to the type of support request, using our experience and feedback from the community. If you have questions or thoughts on how to improve the form, please create a General Support ticket.

Latest Releases

Caliper SDK (Python) 2.72.0 - CHANGELOG

Tecton SDK (Javascript) 1.1.0 - CHANGELOG

Marketplace (Python) 0.6.0 - CHANGELOG