On November 10th 2021, HubSpot's fifth Developer Day took place. As with every year, a ton of new features were presented. This year, HubSpot truly outdid itself by showing ambition and innovation in its vision to better the developer experience (DX). Sandboxes, Private Apps, Developer Projects, its Developer Home and GraphQL on HubSpot were at the center piece of the event.
Available Now
Sandboxes, an essential test tool
Sandbox accounts have been made available to the public for a few months now. They are copies of your main account that allow testing anything (integrations, applications, automations, etc...) before implementing it to your main account. They mitigate the risk associated with the implementation of a new system that impacts your data by conservation data integration in your main account. Since the sandbox account reproduces your main account, all you data is copied over. It can be manipulated without having an impact on your active processes.
When an extension, an integration, an application or if you want to see the impact or a new workflow, its the ideal test environment.
This feature is limited to entreprise hubs. To learn how to activate it, click here.
Get your projects off the ground quicker with Private Apps.
Already, Private Apps are available to everyone. They will serve as an alternative to Public Application listed in the market place. Unlike Public Apps, they should be installed in a single account and don't require the implementation of the OAuth protocol. For the installation of a Private App, HubSpot will generate an Access Token as way to authenticate your app to the HubSpot API. Eliminating the necessity of the OAuth protocol tremendously simplifies the development of custom application, while keeping a secure authentification process.
It represents one barrier down towards building applications tailored to a specific HubSpot account.
Reader be warned, Private Apps do not support extensions and webhooks as of yet.
To learn more about their abilities and about how they are build, click here.
Coming to us in the future
Reader be warned, the following features are subject to change. It would be ill-advised to justify a purchase based on their current description.
Developer Projects, unify your various custom development projets in HubSpot
Developer Projects will complement Private Apps. One Developer Project could inclue an HubSpot Theme linked to a Private App. It will bring together every services needed to build a web application on HubSpot.
An interface, called Developer Home, would allow us to monitor and configure the entire project (CMS et Private App). We also envision being able to host all of it within HubSpot. Certain build and test steps could also be integrated into it!
This would represent enormous improvement for the developer experience as well as contribute to the centralisation of your services within HubSpot. (No more offshore lambda function, Heroku app or webservice set up to interact with the CMS or the CRM)
Here is a snapshot of what was seen during Gregory Cornelius's (Tech Lead - Developer Product Group, at HubSpot) presentation.
The entire presentation is available on Youtube.
On top of that, we expect Private Apps limitations to be reduced so that they can handle webhooks and extensions.
Hubspot GraphQL, display dynamic content based on your CRM data.
Hubspot also introduced a new way to query data! They launched a GraphQL API. It's a direct way to query data from various sources instead of having to sequentially make REST API requests to different endpoints. In addition to simplifying those requests, the GraphQL API enables the inclusion of the requests directly within a module a template or a page. No more need to script a HTTPS request on your page to use the data that is stored on HubSpot!
The data is prefetched on the server and the client (the web page) renders a fully built page with the requested data with the help HubL. We can expect page load times to be better now then with the previous method that uses the REST API.
Build your request in a .graphql file and reference it in your module definition or in your template like this:
// Module’s meta.json { "data_query_path": "../../data-queries/myQueryFile" }
// Template’s start
<!-- templateType: page isAvailableForNewContent: true label: GraphQL page dataQueryPath: ../data-queries/myQuery -->
In your content, your data will then be stored in a HubL variable.
Amazing!
This feature is already in Beta for CMS Hub professional or enterprise users. To learn more about it and see more exemples, click here.
Conclusion
Starting today, you can start discovering Sandboxes and Private Apps. For 2022, we'll be patiently waiting for the arrival of Developer Projects and for the GraphQL API to be out of Beta.
With the coming of all these new features, it is very exciting to develop on HubSpot. It is becoming easier and easier to build ambitious projects with your CRM.
To get more information about new features throughout HubSpot as a whole, have a look at the article by Emmanuelle Sera on the subject: INBOUND 2021: HubSpot CRM plays in the bigger game
If reading this gave you any project ideas, contact-us and we could make it happen together!
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