Nexus for Developers has been launched by Hexagon as it further opens its SaaS Nexus ecosystem to third-parties, allowing them to develop engineering and manufacturing apps for the platform.
With real-time collaboration and feedback between engineering and manufacturing, Hexagon says Nexus for Developers will provide the tools to help anyone connect equipment, data and processes to build digital realities where insights are available to people in real time, in context and in one place so they can make better-informed decisions.
A platform framework is provided via Software Development Kits (SDKs) to easily connect products and solutions to the Hexagon portfolio. An application only needs to be connected once – afterwards it can talk to any other application plugged in to Nexus and share or receive relevant manufacturing data using standard data models.
The simplicity aims to help users to establish and maintain connectivity easily and to quickly improve common workflows and remove manual import and export between SaaS or desktop applications, enabling innovative new digital reality solutions that connect and synchronise disparate tools for real-time collaboration.
Altium is the first company to connect its cloud platform to Nexus, integrating thermal simulation capabilities from Hexagon’s computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software with PCB design tools via its Altium 365 platform. Altium CTO Leigh Gawne, commented: ”We were able to build this proof of concept in just a couple of weeks.
“By bringing together data from Hexagon’s complementary engineering and manufacturing applications Altium 365 customers are able to speed up product development and reduce waste, clearly demonstrating the value of the Nexus open platform and its capability in connecting different products and platforms together to deliver innovative, connected smart digital realities.”
The new toolset is intended to supercharge development by including a library which offers reusable user interface components that accelerate UI development, enabling developers to efficiently build high-quality, feature-rich user experiences, and SDKs that allow developers to enrich their own cloud or desktop applications with the SaaS experiences enabled by Nexus.
“Engineers in small and large companies globally must solve problems every day: systems that don’t talk, enterprise platforms that only IT can change, a mix of office tools like Excel; scripts, engineering or operational technology running from locally stored files that can be distributed ad hoc throughout teams. Nexus for Developers provides easy-to-implement solutions to these problems too,” said a Hexagon spokesperson.
Early access to Nexus for Developers is now available, with a full launch scheduled for late 2023. DEVELOP3D readers can register their early interest here.
