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You’ve worked hard to build your KeyLines application. Your chart looks beautiful and everyone was blown away by your time bar, mapping and SNA combo. Good work! The next step is deploying it – taking you local KeyLines web application and making it accessible to your end users in a secure and scalable way.
This part of the process pretty simple. But it’s a topic our Support Team get asked about all the time, so here are our top 5 questions on deploying KeyLines:
1. Who can I deploy my application to?
The short answer is “whoever needs it”. KeyLines is a web component. You simply install the assets on your server – including any images, icons, etc – and then provide users with a link to access it.
Because KeyLines is client-side, you have the flexibility to design the client-server relationship how you like. Access control can be managed with your preferred method, and data can be encrypted using SSL or any other mechanism.
A KeyLines license generally does not limit the number of end-users to whom you can deploy your application either.
Read more about KeyLines’ architecture
2. How do I deploy KeyLines as part of my mobile application?
The applications you build will run in virtually any browser on any device. This means there are no specific issues to consider when deploying KeyLines as part of a mobile application.
Generally mobile packaging requires all assets to be published in a single bundle. As long as the KeyLines files are stored in the same location as your other JavaScript files, you should be fine.
3. Can I minify KeyLines?
Minification (or ‘uglification’) is a technique used to reduce file size of websites and web applications. This can improve load times as less data – up to 10x less – has to pass across to your user’s machine.
To reduce the number of bytes to the bare minimum, the uglification process parses JavaScript code and reduces internal variables and function names to single or double digits.
Of course, it is possible to minify your KeyLines files to reduce loading time, but consider two points first:
- KeyLines is already a relatively lightweight file.
- KeyLines comes already minified.
It’s up to you!
4. How do I deploy KeyLines as part of a larger web application?
This is a common approach: deploying a KeyLines component inside a dashboard, or at a specific stage in a user workflow.
As we mentioned, KeyLines doesn’t need any special treatment. You can load KeyLines at the beginning with your other app files, or load it on demand with a JavaScript Module Management system (Browserify, Webpack, ES6, AMD, SystemJS, etc.).
5. How do I deploy KeyLines?
Hopefully, some of the answers above will give you some idea how to answer this question. KeyLines is a pure front-end library. It should be deployed in the same manner as jQuery, Angular, your images, or any other web assets.
Just remember to include the JavaScript tag on your webpage and it will work.
Still unclear?
We pride ourselves on offering the best developer support possible. Our support team is made up of core KeyLines developers – the people who build the toolkit are the same people who help you to implement it.
If you have any questions about any aspect of KeyLines, get in touch.
