Why Platform Engineering is Good for Developer Experience and How DHTMLX Fits In

The web development landscape is evolving rapidly, offering exciting opportunities for innovation but also introducing new challenges. Development teams frequently grapple with complex infrastructures, inefficient workflows, and an ever-growing cognitive load — keeping up with new technologies, APIs, and best practices can be overwhelming. That’s where platform engineering comes into play, enabling you to create an internal developer platform for handling software development complexities.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how platform engineering reshapes the software development process and how DHTMLX UI components can be useful in building user-friendly developer platforms.

Platform Engineering in Modern Software Development

Platform engineering is a trendy approach to facilitate the delivery of software solutions within organizations. In the 2010s, tech giants like Google and Facebook started using this concept to enhance the efficiency of their tech teams. In recent years, platform engineering has been constantly growing and gaining momentum. Gartner experts claim that by 2026, 80% of large software engineering companies will establish platform engineering teams.

One of the recent trend reports prepared by Dzone also emphasizes the growing popularity of platform engineering in the programming world. The Dzone team surveyed software developers, architects, and other IT professionals on a variety of questions related to the matter, particularly on platform engineering adoption within respondents’ organizations, and received the following answers:

Source: Dzone Trend Report “Developer Experience” 2025

The respondents of this report also pointed out that platform engineering is widely used for automating the environment across all stages of software development, optimizing software delivery workflows, centralizing and standardizing development tooling, etc. Here is the full list of case scenarios for platform engineering specified by the participants of the survey:

Source: Dzone Trend Report “Developer Experience 2025”

Platform engineering often finds practical application in building internal developer platforms (IDPs) to meet the needs of development teams within organizations. Based on DevOps principles, IDPs provide developers with a standardized environment and a set of tools to streamline software development and deployment. Such platforms are becoming increasingly popular as companies look to bring the productivity of their development teams to a new level. Other key beneficiaries of IDPs are operations teams, product managers, DevOps engineers, security specialists, business stakeholders, and certainly end-users. It is not surprising since IDPs help in various aspects such as accelerating release cycles, ensuring better adherence to security/compliance standards, and facilitating the management of infrastructure/environments.

Let us turn to the results of the Dzone report once again and see the other practical benefits of IDPs:

Source: Dzone Trend Report “Developer Experience 2025”

Now, we delve deeper into IDPs and consider some of their main structural elements.

Exploring Core Elements of Internal Developer Platform

You already know the main purposes and benefits of using IDPs in software development. However, it is hard to grasp the full value and potential of these platforms without knowing their basic structure.

The list of common IDP elements includes the following:

• CI/CD Pipelines — automated workflows for building, testing, and deploying applications, ensuring faster and more reliable releases.
• Service Catalog — a centralized hub for reusable services, APIs, templates, and components to accelerate development.
• Infrastructure Management — the system that automates and scales the provisioning of resources on demand.
• Observability & Monitoring — tools for ensuring platform reliability via logging, tracing, and performance monitoring.
• Access Control & Security — pre-configured security & compliance rules.
• Dynamic Configuration Management — Automated handling of environment-specific configurations, feature flags, and application settings to support flexible operations.

While IDPs and their capabilities are implemented as backend systems, developers can access them via a special front-end layer known as internal developer portals. This portal offers a unified and user-friendly UI that aggregates all necessary tools — service catalogs, CI/CD pipelines, dashboards, documentation, templates, plugins, and APIs — making development more accessible and efficient. Thus, dev teams can focus on actual app development rather than searching for necessary items. Such platform portals also simplify the onboarding of new members in dev teams. All IDP components are commonly grouped into functional domains called planes.

By following guided workflows and best practices in UDPs referred to as “golden paths”, developers minimize time on figuring out infrastructure and focus more on coding.

When organizations choose an IDP, they have two main options: purchase a ready-to-use platform or build a custom solution. Regarding popular ready-made IDPs, we can mention Backstage, Compass, Cortex, and Humanities. Although such IDPs can be put into action faster and be less expensive, custom solutions can be tailored to fully cover the specific needs of businesses and DHTMLX components can be useful for achieving this challenging goal. Let us see how.

Using DHTMLX UI Components in IDPs

Core IDP functionalities involve backend processes, which operate independently of frontend UI components. However, it is great for developers to access an IDP via a well-designed UI (i.e. IDP portal), making it much easier to work with the platform. The versatility of DHTMLX’s JavaScript UI components makes them suitable for enhancing the IDP portal.

Organizations aiming to provide developers with intuitive interfaces for managing projects, visualizing data, and streamlining workflows can benefit from integrating DHTMLX components.​

For instance, Gantt, Scheduler, Diagram, and Grid components can be utilized for the following purposes within the IDP portal:

• visualizing workflows, pipeline stages, and dependencies in software development
• mapping system architectures and infrastructure relationships,
• planning and scheduling infrastructure maintenance, updates, or resource provisioning,
• visualizing data on logs, metrics, and system health,
• coordinating development teams through interactive planning tools.

DHTMLX components are highly customizable, performant, and compatible with popular technologies. Therefore, it can be a good idea to consider these components for enhancing the usability of IDP portals and boosting their efficiency.

Wrapping Up

An internal developer platform is a cornerstone of platform engineering, providing development teams with a seamless, well-integrated environment to build, test, and deploy apps. However, IDPs can be quite complex in terms of structure and developers often rely on special UIs (portals) to conveniently interact with the platform. By incorporating DHTMLX components, it is possible to create an intuitive and functional IDP portal, contributing to a better developer experience.