GitHub debut a number of new features
GitHub, the world’s leading platform for developers has unveiled GitHub Marketplace. The new portal offers an entirely new way to purchase and discover tools to power developer workflows. We had a quick chat with Mike McQuaid, Senior Software Engineer at GitHub to find out more.
It’s an exciting day for GitHub, you’ve just launched the GitHub market place – what’s behind the move?
We want to make it as easy as possible for developers to get the tools and services they need to be successful.
How will it simplify developer workflows?
This initial launch of GitHub Marketplace will allow GitHub customers to discover, browse and purchase apps providing, for example: CI, project management, and static code analysis using their existing GitHub payment methods.
What kinds of tools and partners are already in there?
Our launch Continuous Integration partners are TravisCI, CircleCI, Appveyor and Percy, Project Management partners are ZenHub, Waffle, Zube and Codetree, Monitoring partners are Sentry, Rollbar and Blackfire and Code Quality partners are Codacy, Codecov and Codebeat.
That’s not the only news, you have just overhauled the GitHub Integration Directory – it’s now GitHub Apps. Aside from the name change, what’s new?
GitHub Apps (formerly Integrations) are now going from pre-release to general availability, and we’ve improved them extensively along the way via feedback from our early adopters, so we consider them ready for all integrators to use. There’s a few new features such as GitHub Apps having OAuth so applications can identify users. You can still create GitHub OAuth applications but, like the REST API compared to GraphQL, we consider GitHub Apps to be a better fit for more integrators going forward.
GitHub GraphQL is now generally available, how was the early release programme and what’s your message to developers who haven’t yet tried its capabilities?
The early release programme has been great so far, we’ve had good feedback and testing that’s enabled us to offer and use more GraphQL APIs. Developers who haven’t tried it yet should do so soon: it’s the best way to build products and tools that integrate with GitHub. For example, it’s much easier with GraphQL to get all the information you want in a single API call rather than the previous REST method which often required an additional call for each desired subresource.
