Eclipse Kuksa 0.2.0 Release Review

The Eclipse Kuksa 0.2.0 release's main focus is on on integrating the cloud and in-vehicle with a holistic authorization and authentication system based on Keycloak. Apart from that, several other interesting features and improvements have been introduced.

On the cloud side we started moving the deployment layer to a terraform and helm charts based approach. The App Store now has consent functionality, is integrated with the IDE and uses Keycloak for authentication and authorization. Some minor improvements have been implemented for the InfluxDbConnector and the deployment infrastructure.

On the In-Vehiclen side the Keycloak integration has been implemented and also extended to the direct access API. In addition to that, the in-vehicle platform received improvements on the Viss-Server implementation, the App-Manager and, separated from the software stack, version 0.2.0 contains also a hardware layout of a dongle to retrofit cars with in-vehicle functionality. With version 0.2.0 message buffering is now available and allows to bridge network interruptions.

The Kuksa IDE now provides typescript extensions to establish an end-to-end workflow in the Eclipse Kuksa ecosystem from the IDE via the Appstore and Hawkbit to the device. As the In-Vehicle gateway can be run on different operating systems (Raspbian, AGL, Debian, Apertis, etc.) or hardware architectures (arm64 etc.), In-Vehicle applications will be provided in a generic way via docker images. Therefore, a build script allows to generate target-specific docker images. Based on a generated .yaml config file and a Python-based script, the resulting docker images can then be published to the app store and hawkbit respectively. The typescript extensions can be used in either a local VSCode instance or on cloud-based IDEs such as Eclipse Che 7 (based on Eclipse Theia) or GitPod.