The i4 Studio, called Studio hereafter, is a holistic GUI supporting i4 App developers to easily implement applications by integrating and orchestrating services, APIs, and connectors. Furthermore, the Studio provides an interface to deploy outcomes to the i4FS Marketplace.

The Studio is a i4FS specific IDE that can be used by developers. It accompanies them through the entire i4 Asset development lifecycle and it can be split into the following multiple states

1. Development
2. Packaging and Local Debugging
3. Upload to Marketplace

Development
During the development lifecycle of a i4 Asset, the developer has the Process Designer component at its disposal with which the developer can interactively define the i4 Asset processes in order to specify inputs, outputs, etc. The developer can also use the i4 Frontend Environment, where several templates are available that can increase the speed of the development of i4 Assets.

Packaging and Local Debugging
The developer has the option to run i4 Assets locally inside the Studio in the context of the i4 Platform. To make this possible, the application is packed locally and thus converted into an executable debuggable version.

Upload to Marketplace
Once the i4 Asset is ready to be sent to the Marketplace, the Studio uses the previously created i4 Asset package and creates a Docker file with this package. This Docker file is then sent to the Marketplace to make it available for customers to be consumed in their i4 Platforms.