Indigo 2022.2 Progress Update

[jay (support)]

All, we want to express our deep disappointment that it has taken this long to get the 2022.2 release out (obviously we targeted the 2022). The end of last year was a challenge for us in a number of ways. Primarily, we ended up doing some major rewrites that we hadn't really anticipated. We are currently in closed beta, and our goal is to release it to everyone on February 22 (about two weeks from this post) if we don't find any showstoppers.

Here are the highlights:

First, we completely rewrote the Indigo Web Server, using brand new technologies based on Python 3. The result is that the web server is significantly faster at pretty much everything and is built on a base that will continue to allow us to provide more and more value over time. We also designed and built two new APIs (Websockets and HTTP). We know that these new and more modern APIs will enable a lot more interesting integrations going forward. And we also built a completely new Indigo Touch for Web UI. For those that used the old web UI, you'll know that it was extremely dated. Indigo Touch for Web is build on the Websocket API, and is implemented as a single page JavaScript application. So once it loads, there are no more page changes, etc. It's a full-fledged application with lots of new features and is super fast - think Mac Client speed. The new Web server also requires far fewer HTTP calls, including when using Indigo Touch on iOS devices over reflectors. This will increase responsiveness of Indigo Touch, especially when accessing remotely via reflectors.

Second, we made some pervasive changes to the Indigo Server, which will speed the server up and increase reliability, particularly with newer macOS releases. Because of the wide reaching nature of the changes, we spent a lot of time developing and testing to ensure reliability. We understand that reliability is probably the single most important factor for most Indigo users.

Third, we understand that there are still a few plugins lagging behind on being updated, so we spent extra effort so that we could continue support for older plugins for one more release. In Indigo 2023.1 (early Summer-ish), our plan is to finally deprecate python 2 support (which will also help reduce code complexity and increase reliability and speed). But for this release, you are safe - all your old python 2-based plugins should continue to work.

And lastly, we added more Z-Wave device definitions and closed several open bugs. We also have received samples of some of the new Insteon devices (yes, Insteon is back). We are hoping to get support for them in the 2022.2.0 release in a few weeks, but won't know for sure until closer to release day. Note, however, that if we can't get that support in the initial release, we plan to push out 2022.2.1 with those additions.

As always, when we release we will post the release notes here on the Announcements forum and will publish a blog post. But given our tardiness, we wanted everyone to know where we are at for this release.