Typical Visual Application Workflow

A visual application is a collection of resources you use to develop web (and mobile) applications. These resources include the Git repository containing the source files you want to use and the visual application's development environment—all of which come together in a project.

A project collects the people, tools, and processes you need to complete a unit of work in VB Studio. It provides a single unified environment for everyone who will collaborate on an app with the tools they need to develop the app: a Git repository to store source code, a build pipeline to provide continuous integration and delivery, an issue tracking system, and more. Because a visual application project is based on the Visual Application template, it will have everything you need to visually develop an application, including an environment with a Visual Builder instance where your app can be deployed.

Usually, projects are set up for you by a project owner (see Set Up VB Studio for Developing Visual Applications in Administering Visual Builder Studio for an overview of the steps involved). Once a project owner has set up a project and added you to it, you follow a simple workflow to design and develop applications:

Step	Description	More Information
1	Sign in to VB Studio and select your project on the Organization page.	Access VB Studio
2	Create a workspace within your project. A workspace defines all the resources that are available to you when you develop an application in the Designer. You create a workspace by creating a new visual application or by cloning the Git repository of an existing visual application. That's why a workspace is synonymous with a visual application. You can also import the archive of an existing visual application to create a workspace.	Create a workspace
3	Use the Designer's tools in your workspace to lay out pages and develop your application. Preview your application as you develop it, so you get a sense of what your pages will look like to the user.	Develop Your Application
4	When you're ready to have others look at your app, share it and ask for feedback.	Share your application
5	When your work is done, publish your application to make your changes public. You can publish your changes from the Designer, even create a merge request to get it reviewed. This triggers a build pipeline that includes a packaging and deployment job, which should have the credentials required to deploy your application to the Visual Builder instance. On successful completion of this build pipeline, your application will be deployed to your Development Visual Builder instance. You'll also have the option to deploy the application as a progressive web app (PWA), assuming you've enabled PWA support in the app’s Settings editor.	Deploy your application

This workflow describes how to create an app that you deploy to the Development environment of your project. Once you progress to the testing and delivery stages of development, you (or the project owner) should set up test and production instances in the project’s environment to deploy test and production versions of your apps.