This guide follows a Splunk software engineering team on a journey to build solutions with partners, focusing on the real world use cases to showcase various technologies of the Splunk Developer Platform. Like a documentary, it captures our story from envisioning and user experience prototyping to development, packaging and multiple production deployments. It includes the diverse perspectives of developers and testers, administrators and product owners, security experts and release engineers. As on any real journey, we make mistakes, have arguments, and change our minds along the way. So in addition to showing you how best to do things, we highlight the pitfalls and issues that we encounter, and the solutions we find.

The key element of this guidance, of course, is the code. We’ve made the code repos open, and recommend you study the source code of the reference apps and the associated tests. In fact, you can see and replay the code in motion, as it was developed. We encourage you to reuse and learn from it.

The second edition is expanded with 10 new chapters, including 3 new ones in the Journey covering OAuth, alerting and high performance HTTP Event Collector. Additionally we include a new section - the Essentials where we've generalized the lessons learned from this Journey and other development projects into fundamental patterns and practices. We still cover the full spectrum of application development from getting data into Splunk Enterprise to packaging and distributing your app. Each topic combines design and implementation guidelines in a way that supports an iterative
development process. These guidelines cover not only Splunk Enterprise operational and programming concepts that the application deals with directly, but also consider performance, quality, and maintenance issues in recommending particular approaches.