Why the Fan Base of Python and JavaScript Continues to Grow?

The TIOBE Programming Community index indicates the popularity of programming languages. Updated monthly, it is based on various factors, such as the number of skilled programmers, search engine results, etc.

As of April 2020, Python is ranked #3 in the index. In 2006 it was ranked #27. Similarly, in 1996, JavaScript was ranked a lowly #33, but since 2001, it has consistently made it to the Top 10. Currently, JavaScript is ranked #7.

Why are these languages so popular? Or rather, why do they continue to be so popular despite periodic assaults on their value proposition and pronouncements of their demise?
Why the Fan Base of Python and JavaScript Continues to Grow

According to TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen, “we need something simple that can be handled by non-software engineers, something easy to learn with fast edit cycles and smooth deployment. Python meets all these needs.” And everyone who loves dynamic website pages is a fan of JavaScript – even if they don’t realize it!

Python and JavaScript: A Lookback

DidYouKnow – Python is named after the classic British comedy show Monty Python!

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Python.org describes Python as “an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics.” Some of the world’s most popular websites are based on Python: Reddit, Spotify, Netflix, Instagram, and…. Google!

As a general-purpose coding language, Python can be used for more than web, web app, or web API development – unlike HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Therefore, it is also used for:

  • Scientific research and computing.
  • Systems automation.
  • Data Science.
  • Machine Learning.

Python allows disparate code to interoperate, giving rise to the semi-affectionate term, “glue language”. Python is regularly revised with new features to satisfy the evolving requirements of development teams.

What’s cool about the JavaScript story?

W3Schools calls JavaScript the “Programming Language for the Web.” This lightweight interpreted scripting language allows programmers to implement complex features on web pages, such as dynamically updated content, multimedia, animated images, etc. It can update both HTML and CSS and helps to extend the functionality of websites using third-party scripts.
Unlike Python, which is used to develop the back ends of web applications, JavaScript can be used for both the back and front ends of web and mobile applications. Do, no cool pop-culture references, but a cool language for sure.

Why does the World swear by Python?

  • Code Reuse:

    • Python supports modules and packages, making code reuse possible, which shortens development cycles. Programmers don’t have to start from scratch if the reused code will perform the same (or similar) function in the new application. They can, instead, write code to create unique, value-adding functionalities for the final product. Thus, code reusability helps to create better software, faster.

  • Built-in Functionalities:

    • Python’s built-in data structures, pre-built libraries and frameworks, and features like dynamic typing and dynamic binding also make it a very attractive proposition for rapid application development. Python is most commonly used for scripting and automation. However, it can also be used to build high-quality software, whether the requirement is for standalone applications or web services. Python also provides all the functionalities required to create REST APIs, comprehensive, data-driven sites, and more.

  • Versatile applicability:

    • Although Python is not the “fastest” language, it is still extremely versatile in terms of supported use cases. For instance, it is the preferred language for building Machine Learning applications related to speech recognition, financial services, or streaming entertainment services (think Netflix). Python also offers several built-in libraries for scientific computing and data science, for use cases related to astronomy, bioinformatics, statistical analyses, and even psychology.

  • Easy to use, adopt and update:

    • Python has a highly readable and straightforward syntax. It also follows indentation rules and doesn’t use enclosing braces. Being a dynamically typed language, developers don’t have to determine variable types. The interpreter will infer these types, and all checks will be made at runtime. Since programmers don’t have to worry about complexities, they can learn it easily, and start writing programs quickly.

Why the World Swears by JavaScript?

  • Great for client-side scripting and fast results:

    • The core client-side JavaScript language offers a very useful functionality that is massively popular in the world of web development today: the ability to build Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). APIs make it easy to interconnect programs that would otherwise be difficult to do. Since the code is executed on the user’s processor instead of the webserver, it saves bandwidth and reduces the load on the latter. Moreover, fast processing ensures that results are available almost instantly, so pages load faster for the user.

    JavaScript is also useful for writing server-side code – using platforms like Node.js – to provide and store resources needed by the client, and to respond to client requests (via HTTP) to deliver dynamic content to the user. In that sense, it keeps company with other programming languages like PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, Perl, and ASP.NET.

  • Easy to learn and implement:

    • Like Python, JavaScript is also an easy language to learn. Its syntax is close to English, and it uses an HTML DOM model that allows the language to quickly access, change, or react to all the elements of an HTML document. It can also change all the CSS styles on the page. This makes it a powerful language for creating dynamic HTML.

  • Requires no compilation, is browser- and device-agnostic:

    • Since JavaScript is an interpreted language, not a compiled language; it does not require a compiler. The user’s browser reads the code, interprets it as HTML tags, and then runs it. JavaScript runs on many browsers out-of-the-box. It also runs on every device, unlike desktop or mobile applications that run only on specific devices or operating systems. This advantage makes it easy to write cross-platform apps.

  • Easy to debug and test:

    • For such a powerful language, JavaScript is surprisingly easy to debug and test. All modern browsers come with a built-in JavaScript debugger that can be turned on or off as required. Many open-source, user-friendly testing tools are also available, including Cypress.io, Chrome DevTools, and Mocha.

Conclusion

Software is everywhere – websites, mobile apps, devices, machines, vehicles, factories, and everything in between. Today’s developers and programmers are spoiled for choice when it comes to learning and implementing programming languages. And given the many benefits, it’s not surprising that the legions of Python and JavaScript fans keep on growing!

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May 25, 2021 Development No comments yet

A Long Hard Look at AIOps

AIOps or Artificial Intelligence for IT operations means applying artificial intelligence (AI) to improve IT operational effectiveness. AIOps makes use of aspects like analytics, big data, and machine learning abilities to perform its functions like –

  • Gathering and aggregating large and ever-increasing amounts of operations data created by several IT infrastructure components, performance-monitoring tools, and applications.
  • Intelligently zeroing in on the ‘signals’ in all that ‘noise’ to categorize important patterns and events associated with the availability issues and system performance.
  • Diagnosing root causes and reporting them to the IT section for swift response and recovery actions. In some cases, it helps to resolve these issues automatically without any need for human intervention.
  • Enabling IT operations teams to react rapidly by replacing several individual, manual IT operations tools with one intelligent and automated IT operations platform. It also helps to avoid slowdowns and outages proactively, without effort.

Many experts believe that AIOps will become the future of overall IT operations management.

 

A Long Hard Look at AIOps

The Need for AIOps

Nowadays, several organizations are abandoning the traditional infrastructure consisting of individual, static physical systems. Today, it’s all about a dynamic combination of on-premise, managed, private, and public cloud settings. They prefer running on virtualized or software-oriented resources that upgrade and reconfigure continually.

Various systems and applications across these environments create an ever-rising tidal wave of operational data. The average enterprise IT infrastructure, as estimated by Gartner, produces three-times extra IT operations data annually.

Traditional domain-based IT management solutions can be brought to their knees by volume of data. Intelligently sorting the important events out of the mountain of data is a dream, at best. Correlating data through various but interdependent environments is out of the question. Adding to that, providing predictive analysis and real-time insight for IT operations teams and enabling them to respond to issues promptly, becomes unrealistic. Then, we could wave goodbye to meeting user and customer service level expectations.

With AIOps, you can secure deep visibility into data performance and dependencies through various environments through a unifying solution. You can analyze the data and parse out significant events associated with outages or slowdowns. It can automatically alert IT staff to the issues, their origin and suggest actionable solutions.

 

How does AIOps work?

The easiest way to understand the working of AIOps is by reviewing the role played by each AIOps component. It includes machine learning, big data, and automation in the operational process.

AIOps makes use of big data platforms to combine siloed IT operations data. This includes:

  • System logs and metrics
  • Historical performance and event data
  • Streaming real-time operations events
  • Incident-related data and ticketing
  • Network data, including packet data
  • Related document-based data

AIOps then taps focused on machine learning and analytics capabilities.

  • Individual important event alerts from the ‘noise’: AIOps applies analytics like pattern matching and rule application to sift through the IT operations data and individual signals that denote any important anomalous event alerts.
  • Recognize the origin of the issues and suggest solutions: By utilizing environment-specific or industry-specific algorithms, AIOps can compare abnormal events with other event data from all the environments to pinpoint the reason for any performance or outage problem and propose apt remedies.
  • Automate responses together with actual proactive resolution: AIOps can route alerts automatically and suggest solutions to the right IT teams. It can also generate response teams depending on the problem’s nature and the solution. In several instances, it can process the results from machine learning to activate automatic system responses. It can address the problems happening in real-time, even before the users become aware of their occurrence.
  • Learn always to improve future managing problems: Depending on the machine learning capabilities, analytics AIOps can alter algorithms or develop new ones to recognize problems before occurrence and propose practical solutions. AI models can also support the system to learn about and become accustomed to environment changes, like a new infrastructure installed or reconfigured by DevOps.

Benefits of AIOps

The all-encompassing benefit of AIOps is that it allows IT operations to detect, address, and resolve outages and slowdowns quicker than manually through alerts from several IT operations tools. It results in quite a few benefits, such as –

  • Attain faster mean time to resolution (MTTR): AIOps can identify the root causes of problems earlier and more precisely than humanly possible. It helps the organizations to fix and attain ambitious MTTR goals. For instance, Nextel Brazil, a telecommunications service provider, could minimize incident response times from 30 minutes to 5 minutes with AIOps.
  • Moving from responsive to proactive to prognostic management: AIOps keeps on learning and better detects less-urgent signals or alerts as opposed to more-urgent circumstances. It can offer predictive alerts that allow the IT teams to address impending problems before they cause outages or slowdowns.
  • Streamline IT operations and IT teams: As an alternative to being buried under every alert from every environment setting, only alerts that meet particular service level thresholds or parameters can be sent to AIOps operations teams. It carries the full context necessary for the team to decide on the best possible diagnosis and carry out the fastest corrective measure. As AIOps keeps on learning, improving, and automating, it results in more efficiency with less human effort. Your IT operations team can concentrate on tasks that bring immense strategic value to the business.

AIOps Use-Cases

On top of optimizing IT operations, the visibility and automation support offered by AIOps can help drive other vital aspects of business and IT initiatives. Some of its use cases are as follows –

  • Digital transformation: AIOps is designed to handle complex digital transformation in IT operations. It encompasses virtualized resources, multiple environments, and dynamic infrastructure. This enables freedom and flexibility.
  • Cloud adoption or migration: Cloud adoption is a gradual process. The norm is a hybrid and multi-cloud setup with several interdependencies that can alter too frequently and quickly to document. AIOps can radically decrease the operational risks by offering a clear vision of the interdependencies in cloud migration in such situations.
  • DevOps adoption: DevOps drives development forward by offering more power to setting up and reconfiguring infrastructure for the development teams. However, IT still has to tackle that infrastructure. AIOps offers the necessary automation support to DevOps for effortless management.

AIOps promises to decouple organizational ambitions from the management headache imposed by ballooning IT Infrastructure. This intelligent, automated, and optimized approach to managing the IT backbone could well become an enterprise technology mainstay soon.

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April 26, 2021 AI, DevOps No comments yet

What It Takes To Get CI/CD Right?

The world of software development has changed significantly over the past decade. Applications are everywhere. Mobile and web-based digital channels are the preferred routes for consumers. Expectations are rising on, what seems like, a daily basis. And that holds true for enterprise users as well as common folks.

Developers are increasingly under pressure to keep their codebases agile and open to extensions and upgrades always. Traditional modes of product, app, and solution delivery have found themselves turning to the DevOps methodology in search of ways to address ever-evolving customer needs. DevOps is helping bring much-needed flexibility and agility into practices that developers follow while building the digital assets today’s world demands.

CI/CD Practices

One foundation of DevOps relies on automating the deployment of new code versions for a digital offering. This automation has 2 critical categories into which activities fall:

In simple terms, CI and CD are development principles that encourage automation across the process of an app development project. This empowers developers to make continuous changes in their code without disrupting the actual application that may be in use by end-users. Automation helps development teams deliver new functionalities faster in the product. This allows continuous product iteration.

In wake of the COVID 19 pandemic, software development teams across the world became more distributed than ever. For them, effective collaboration determines the efficiency of the software engineering process. In this scenario, CI and CD-led automation can also lead to better software quality and promote active collaboration between different teams working on a software project like Front-end, back-end, database, QA, etc.

Despite the benefits, several organizations are still not very confident in turning to CI and CD their deployments. A recent survey pointed out that only 38% of the 3650 respondents were using CI and CD in their DevOps implementations.

We believe that one of the key reasons for the slow adoption of CI and CD is the lack of awareness of what it takes to get CI/CD right. With that in mind, let us take a look at some of the best practices in CI/CD that every organization involved in developing digital applications must cultivate in their software engineering teams:

1. Treat CI and CD Individually:

While the end product requires a combination of CI and CD, the operational style for a DevOps-enabled project necessitates that development teams need to focus equally on CI and CD as two separate entities.

In CI, they can manage code changes that are smaller in size for either adding a new feature to an existing software product or making modifications or corrections of faults in the same. In CD, developers have to focus on transitioning their code from release to production through a series of automated steps that encompasses building and testing the code for readiness and finally sending it to end-user view. CI may be easier to implement and companies can focus on moving ahead with CI first and then slowly set the pace for CD which encompasses testing, orchestration, configuration, provisioning, and a whole lot of nested steps.

2. Design a Security-first Approach:

One of the key outcomes of implementing CI and CD is that organizations are equipped to make changes and roll out these changes to production on demand. At that accelerated pace, however, vulnerabilities may creep into the application due to confusion about roles and permissions.

Therefore, it is essential to bake security into the application at every step. Apart from focusing on the architecture and adopting a comprehensive safety posture, it is also essential to address the human element, often the weakest link in security. As a best practice, people need to be assigned specific roles and permissions to be able to perform only what they are tasked to do and not access sensitive or confidential application components in production. Valuable deliverables can be protected by enabling role-based access control for staff who practice CI and CD regularly in their development activities.

3. Create an enabling Ecosystem:

The technology leaders of organizations must make the effort of educating team members about the fact that CI and CD are part of holistic app development and delivery ecosystem and not a simple “input-output” process that can be linearly handled like in an assembly line.

Much is spoken about the need to create a culture of adherence to such practices. A key element of that culture is inculcating process discipline. DevOps, in general, and CI and CD, in particular, hold the potential to dramatically accelerate product delivery timelines. At that pace, alignment is super-critical. The people, processes, and tools must be brought into one page, roles defined, standards assured, and integrations meticulously planned to ensure that the activity moves forward with all stakeholders understanding and drawing value from the implementation.

4. Improve with Feedback:

The fundamental objective app development teams seek to achieve with CI and CD is the ability to release fast and iterate often. This only makes sense when the product iterations, feature additions, and quality improvements are driven by the need to give the users what they need. Also, as with any software development paradigm, applications built with CI and CD can be susceptible to incidents, defects, and issues in their lifecycle. Therefore, it is important for app development teams to build processes that allow them to capture user feedback, work it into the product (or app), test it for its ability to deliver value to the users, and release it fast. Teams must gain feedback, identify patterns through retrospective analysis, and use this learning to improve future CI and CD deployments.

CI and CD open the doors to higher-quality software. Organizations that leverage CI/CD best practices and concepts will gain the ability to differentiate their digital assets from the competition. With faster time to market and lower defects guaranteed, CI and CD help create a development ecosystem suited for high-end products needed by the consumers of today.

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April 7, 2021 DevOps No comments yet

Test Automation in the DevOps World

It’s reasonable to assume that DevOps has two parallel, and equally important, objectives. One primary aim of DevOps is to reduce the development lifecycle with continuous delivery of software to the clients and end-users and the other crucial objective is to improve the software quality. 

It’s never been up for debate that testing is an extremely critical phase in software development. Now, with transformations in the development cycles with fast-paced approaches, such as DevOps and Agile, how we look at testing has evolved. It is now essential to implement smart ways of testing software products and applications. Test automation is one of the approaches to improve testing speed and accuracy. 

Test automation in Devops World

DevOps Testing Strategy 

Before moving to the test automation mechanisms in the world of DevOps, it is necessary to make a pitstop to examine the factors feeding into the DevOps testing strategy. DevOps supports and includes a continuous testing strategy which means testing is conducted at every phase of the process. Testers are involved in the testing of the development plan, design testing, and operations testing with functional and non-functional testing. For example, risk-based or exploratory testing can be executed to test the software designs. When it comes to releasing, the combination of tests can run on the production and test environments.

The primary idea in the DevOps testing strategy is to continuously look for possible gaps and errors. DevOps involves testing right from the initiation till the very end.

Test Automation and DevOps

As stated earlier, DevOps supports and follows a continuous testing strategy. Also, continuous development and delivery are involved in DevOps. At that pace, a high level of collaboration and fast-paced execution is required to meet the expected efficiency and quality levels. 

This is where test automation becomes the key to support the DevOps practices and make sure software quality is always maintained and improved. Some of the best practices for beginning test automation include: 

  • Begin with the test automation flows that are easy and increase the complexity and coverage over time.
  • Develop independent and self-contained automation test cases.
  • Maintain collective ownership during test automation.
  • Collaborate with design, development, and deployment teams.

While following the practices illustrated above, the Test Automation Engineers may still get confused about the mechanisms to integrate these with DevOps. A common workflow is presented below to enable test automation teams to amalgamate automation testing in DevOps practices. 

  • The test engineers shall meet with the developers to discuss the user story and list down the behaviors from a business standpoint. The behaviors identified shall then be converted to Behavior-driven development (BDD) tests. 
  • Developers shall work on the user story and create unit and integration tests in collaboration with the testing team under test-driven development (TDD). The shared code repository shall be set-up and the tests and codes must be deployed in the repository. 
  • DevOps Engineers shall create Continuous Integration (CI) servers to execute the code in the shared repository and execute all the tests in TDD and BDD. 
  • Automation Engineers shall analyze these workflows and tests to create the automated test scripts. The engineers shall also develop additional tests around performance, security, and non-functional testing. 
  • DevOps Engineers shall reuse the test scrips loaded in the shared repository for acceptance testing.

DevOps’ continuous testing strategy involves several resources and the Automation Test Engineers must collaborate with these resources to effectively conduct test automation.

DevOps Test Automation Tools 

Obviously, there are many test automation tools available in the market, and making the right choice is complex. To conduct test automation in DevOps, the tool selected must have the following features: 

  • Seamless integration in the CI/CD pipeline. 
  • Platform-independence to run in any of the infrastructures. 
  • Multi-user access to be used by testers, developers, and others at the same time. 
  • The short learning curve for better release management. 
  • Maintenance of automation tests and scripts.
  • Multiple language options – JavaScript, PowerShell, C#, etc.

Each tool will come with a set of features and benefits that will decide its aptness for each specific situation. For instance, TestComplete is a typical automation tool that can meet some test automation requirements in DevOps. This is an automated UI testing tool that can support a variety of test cases with enhanced test coverage. The tool comes with record and replay capabilities and an AI-equipped customizable object repository. Tools like these can allow automation test engineers to develop end-to-end tests quickly and efficiently. Good test automation tools can be easily integrated with the various continuous integration systems. Given the prevailing environment with remote teams, it’s also useful to look if the tool comes with distributed testing capabilities. The right set of features will help enhance the testing abilities of the team and also simplify the maintenance tasks. 

The bar for software quality has been raised very high and the consequences for failing this test can be dire for a product or application. In the uber-accelerated world of DevOps, software testing has to take on a completely new dimension. Given the need to test more, test faster, and test better, automation presents itself as the most appropriate strategy to achieve software quality. 

Is your Software Testing Strategy DevOps Ready?

 

March 31, 2021 DevOps, Quality Assurance Testing No comments yet

Powerful Cross-Platform App Development With Flutter

When Flutter emerged on the horizon of mobile app development, some thought of it as flash in the pan. The framework, however, turned out to be a revelation, helping developers to address several challenges that tormented them in mobile app development. Cross-platform applications faced a lot of issues such as lack of access to a device’s camera, microphones, and other features. Flutter seemed to have some answers.

Crossplatform mobile app development with Flutter

The Coming of Flutter

In the early days of cross-platform development, the technology had its share of issues. Cross-platform apps were sub-optimal, and their maintenance was nothing less than a hazard.

Popular mobile development platforms at that time included Xamarin, Ionic, and PhoneGap. These frameworks were surpassed by React Native, which operated on web logic. And then Google announced Flutter.

Flutter naysayers were quickly proven wrong, as Flutter took everyone by storm, setting itself as a powerful cross-platform app development tool. Let us find out about the components that made Flutter as successful it is.

  1. Single Codebase for all Platforms:

    2. Obviously, as a cross-platform framework, Flutter enables a single codebase for various operating systems. Whether iOS or Android, the interface will look the same. Everything in Flutter is a widget though and the code comes across as a markup.
    Flutter developers can work with clients to come up with a focus group for testing an app’s concept before going ahead with the development. This allows them to experiment with the app’s logic dynamically. Developers can build a specific part of the functionality, test it with the focus group, and get back to development with new directions. The code undergoes just one change for all operational systems, helping engineers to move ahead rapidly on the project.

  2. Unaffected by OS and Version Updates:

    3. Flutter code is designed to remain unaffected by any OS update or system customization, thanks to its own rendering engine.
    Another way Flutter code fosters stability is via version compatibility. This allows the usage of old code in the upcoming apps.

  3. Hot reload facilitating quick experimentation with code:

    4. A Flutter feature that has got quite some traction with engineers is the hot reload. This helps developers quickly experiment with code, create UIs, add features, and fix errors. Developers execute hot reload by infusing updated source code files into the running Dart virtual machine which updates classes with the new versions of code components such as fields and functions, enabling engineers to quickly find out how their changes in code have affected the appearance and functioning of the app.

  4. Independence of UI from Data:

    5. The BLoC (Business Logic Components) architectural pattern that Flutter follows is based on the reactive programming approach. By deploying streams, the architectural pattern facilitates the segregation of the app’s user interface from data and reactivity. It uses structuring, streams, and async methods to prevent delays in the app’s performance. Even while the server streams out the data, animations and screen scrolls keep working flawlessly. BLoC pattern architecture works well in apps with complex architecture and a lot of data.

  5. Implement UI/UX design of any complexity:

    6. The absence of recursive calls during the processing of the layout means the number of nested objects in the Flutter code has no effect on the performance and responsiveness of the app. Usually, the number of widgets compiled in the native app negatively affects the performance of the app. Flutter facilitates the execution of UI/UX design of any complexity and stylization.

  6. Automated memory storage:

    7. Dart, a cross-platform programming language that Flutter uses is object-oriented and strongly typed. Dart uses algorithms to determine the correctness of the code. The garbage collector mechanism stores memory automatically, so there is no need for developers to monitor it.

  7. Multithreading:

    8. Support for multithreading helps engineers find appropriate solutions for long-running tasks that need to be processed by the application in the backend while it is running. Threads are termed Isolates in Dart. Code refers to just one primary Isolate as the UI Thread.

  8. Compilation into the native code:

    9. Developers can compile Dart into the native code to boost the functioning of the app. Engineers may choose an ‘Ahead of Time’ or ‘Just in Time’ approach for code compilation during the build. During the build, when engineers opt for the ‘Ahead of Time’ approach, the Dart code is compiled for ARM and x86 processors. When they follow the ‘Just in Time’ approach, the code supports dynamic compilation during the runtime.

  9. Libraries:

    10. Libraries come across as a strong component in Flutter. DarkPub is a popular package manager among developers as it has several reusable packages and libraries. Even when using an external lib, engineers can keep full control and retain the ability to adjust the code.

Conclusion:

Flutter is now among the frontline cross-platform mobile development technologies. Backed by Google, it has immense resources and enables easy learning with high-quality documentation. Simple to learn and convenient to use, Flutter can support small, medium as well as large enterprise projects. The framework is tailor-made for devising an extensive functionality for complex enterprise solutions in a rapid-fire way or for creating non-standard interfaces. Having a strong community and innovative solutions, Flutter comes across as a framework that assures a sound development journey. Clearly, this is a great tool for developers to develop applications with flair.

January 22, 2021 Development 1 comment

All You Need to Know About Containers

Visualize this: In the coming two years, more than 500 million new applications will be built — a number equal to total applications developed in the last four decades. 

This explosion in applications will be the result of businesses’ efforts to turn into “digital innovation factories”. Intrinsically, businesses will create digital products and services with speed and scale that will be at the heart of their digital value proposition. And a number of these applications will be built and deployed in containers. 
all you need to know about devops containers

Container-powered infrastructure is pulling enormous interest world-wide because containers enable agile and automated deployment of modern applications at scale and economy. A single server can host several containers as compared to virtual machines (VMs) for higher utilization. Considering the speed, efficiency, and practicality of containers in managing cloud-native applications, businesses are adopting containers at never before rates.

Here are five things that you must know about containers:

  1. Containers Enhance Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) Processes:

    2. The advancement in continuous integration and continuous delivery processes has enabled developers to implement and deliver applications rapidly and frequently. Containers drive CI/CD advantages further via portability. When each container can be seamlessly and dependably moved to different platforms, like between a developer’s device and a private/public cloud, CI/CD processes become seamless. 
     
    Containers can also be replicated or scaled without suspending other processes, and each container’s individuality enables applications to be developed, tested, deployed, and modified simultaneously, thereby eliminating interruptions and delays. By utilizing containers combined with CI/CD, the entire software delivery life cycle (SDLC) speeds up, with lesser manual tasks, and challenges of migrating between different environments. 

  2. Containers Refashion Legacy Applications:

    3. Most businesses don’t have the luxury to build “all-new” applications for cloud-based platforms. Rather they prefer migrating existing or legacy applications to the cloud. Many applications can utilize the ‘lift and shift’ approach to the cloud, signifying that most will need to be radically refactored to benefit from the cloud features as code alterations are made. The applications are revamped, recoded, and repurposed for cloud platforms giving the application – a new purpose. 
    This is not easy, and there are innovative technologies that need to be considered. Applications are enabled to externalize APIs, and microservices allow applications to leverage the best functionality on cloud platforms. Containerization of the applications guarantees a seamless distributed architecture and cloud-to-cloud portability. 
    Containerizing legacy applications comes with several benefits, such as reducing complexity by utilizing container abstractions. The containers eliminate the dependencies on the underlying infrastructure services, which further lessens the complications of dealing with those platforms. This implies that developers can abstract the access to resources, like storage, from the application itself. This makes the application portable, but at the same time also speeds the refactoring of the applications.

  3. Containers Create Dependable and Resilient Environments:

    4. With the help of Kubernetes, containers can either operate on the same server and utilize similar resources or can even be distributed. Individual containers allow the parallel development of applications and ensure that a break down in one application does not disturb or cause a failure in other containers. This isolation also enables teams to quickly detect and fix technical problems without triggering any downtime in other areas.
     
    Containers offer the best of both worlds, enabling resource sharing while reducing downtime and permitting teams to prolong developing innovative functions. The result is highly-efficient environments that enable teams to march forward with software development and delivery, although other teams are caught up testing or fixing errors.

  4. Containers – A Better Option for Virtualization:

    5. In the conventional approach of virtualization, a hypervisor virtualizes physical hardware. Every virtual machine holds a guest OS, a computer-generated copy of the hardware that the OS needs to stream, and an application and its related libraries and dependencies.
    Rather than virtualizing the fundamental hardware, containers virtualize the operating system (usually Linux), so every independent container encompasses only the application along with its libraries and dependencies. Containers are slim, speedy, and portable because, as opposed to virtual machines, containers don’t require a guest OS in every instance and can utilize the features and resources of the host OS.
    Just like virtual machines, containers enable developers to enhance CPU and memory utilization. However, containers go a step further because they also power microservice architectures, where application components can be employed and scaled more minutely. This is a lucrative option to scale up a monolithic application because a single component takes the load.

  5. Containers Offer Superior Performance:

    6. The slashed resource load is a key reason for businesses to leverage containerized platforms over virtual machines. Containers provide more than ten times the density suggesting that developers can operate up to ten times more containers in a single host.  

    Additionally, hypervisors are susceptible to latency issues. As compared to virtual machines, containers considerably reduce latency. Furthermore, containers load much faster than virtual machines. Containers thus offer a substantial boost in performance by decreasing the resource load and latency. And the quicker load time caters to a seamless user experience.

Containers will continue to grab market share from conventional virtualization technologies. This technology is already fast-tracking digital transformation and application modernization efforts for several businesses and across diverse applications. We may not physically see containers being utilized, but the truth be told, we utilize them every day. Be it Google or Netflix, we are using containers every day in the back end. 

The adoption of containers is real and is revolutionizing how businesses are deploying IT infrastructure. From rapidly delivering applications to amplifying development to deployment processes, to slashing infrastructure and software costs, containers offer brilliant business outcomes to application developers. 

 

January 5, 2021 DevOps No comments yet

The Most Important 2021 Technology Trends For Product And App Development Leaders To Consider

The COVID 19 pandemic was a game-changer for technology innovation. It accelerated digital transformation at a pace that was never witnessed before. Huge paradigm shifts that would normally take years to come about happened in a matter of days. The shift to remote working in the workforce culture coupled with the rising demand for digital services by consumers in almost all sectors will ultimately change the way product and app developers build software for years to come. From crunching massive amounts of data for recommendations to enabling even clocks and heaters to communicate with smartphones, 2021 will witness new dimensions of connected environments.

product and app development technology

Let us take a sneak peek into the top 4 technology trends that every product or app development leaders need to consider in 2021:

  1. Naturalization of AI:

    2. Nearly 80% of all emerging technologies are expected to have AI foundations by 2021. Since most apps and products are built to integrate with emerging tech innovations, AI will transition from being an optional enhancement for a product to a key enabler of capabilities that modern consumers demand. There will be widespread demands for the consumer as well as enterprise apps to be seamlessly integrated with popular virtual assistants and perform autonomous services ranging from setting home alarms to scheduling machinery shut-down times in industrial establishments.

    While building digital products and apps for the market, leaders must take the extra effort to recognize areas where AI can deliver value better than their normal workflows and engineer it into the core foundations of their apps during the design stage itself.

  2. Blockchain becoming the Foundation of Transparency:

    3. As more sensitive business processes and consumer services turn into app-driven experiences, there is a huge need for businesses to be seen as transparent to their end-users. Only if they provide a high degree of transparency, will users be confident of entrusting their confidential data for better digital services. To enable this transparency, product development engineers need to turn their attention to blockchain technology as it has now been proven to be one of the most transparent modes of information management with no loopholes to affect the integrity of data.
    By using smart contracts, several business workflows can be programmed for automated collection, processing, and management of data. Every step of the journey in a digital application can be made traceable with blockchain thereby reducing chances of manipulation to Zero levels. The growing affinity for blockchain from the enterprise world is evident from studies that predict a CAGR of 69.4% for the technology through to 2025.

  3. Minimalism in Design:

    4. The pandemic of 2020 resulted in a massive number of consumers shifting a majority of their daily routines like shopping, dining, work, and entertainment to digital only services. This was also true of enterprise tools, technologies, and products. As users became remote, they struggled with lower bandwidth connections, device non-standardization, and throttled access to helpdesks. With most folks, the biggest demand while moving to a digital platform for any of their needs previously accessed from the enterprise, was for the platform to be simple in design. Users want tools that allow them to get what they want in the least time and with minimum fuss.

    App leaders need to recognize that to allow simplicity, they need to foster the principles of minimalist designs that take away the unnecessary UI clutter in apps and digital products and lays out a clean interface that focuses more on intuitive workflows that drive productive usage of the app. Excess content, intrusive monitoring, unnecessary pop-ups, and cluttered notifications will all have to make way for a sleek interface that promotes a more human-centric experience rather than a machine-centric one.

  4. Navigating the Connected World:

    5. In 2021, it is estimated that the global market size for IoT will exceed USD 520 Billion. This is a revelation for businesses that want to offer connected experiences to consumers by integrating hardware and software across different lifestyle and workplace experiences. By allowing more capabilities to connect to a wide number of public or private networks of sensors and computing services, apps and digital products can elevate the connected experience. By leveraging innovative technology such as edge computing, businesses can build apps or products that will deliver more powerful services more accessibly at a pace faster than ever before. With more consumers rapidly investing in smart devices ranging from home security to healthcare, there is a huge market for businesses to build apps with services that monetize the data generated by these intelligent devices.

As the world collectively continues to manage life in the new normal, digital services will gradually become an irreplaceable part of our lives. From schooling to work and shopping, a majority of consumers will retain these behavioral shifts even after we have left the pandemic behind us. This will be a golden opportunity for businesses to enable more mainstream services and enterprise tools to be transitioned and delivered through digital products or apps and realize value faster than with physical experiences.

January 1, 2021 Development No comments yet

Is your DevOps initiative pushing up your Cloud bills?

First, there were developers. And then software development got more challenging, more complex, less straightforward. That resulted in the emergence of a new “combo” discipline – DevOps. DevOps was seen as a medium for fuelling software teams into supercharged IT powerhouses.

DevOps was introduced to improve collaboration. It is a working culture that smashes the conventional siloes between software development, quality assurance, and operations teams, empowering all application life-cycle stakeholders to work collectively – from conception to design, development, production, and support.

Is your DevOps initiative pushing up your Cloud bills?

But all is not what it seems in the world of DevOps. DevOps puts pressure on teams to deliver faster releases while scaling with demand. On this path, the cloud is one of the significant resources needed to make a DevOps environment run smoothly. And this is where the challenge lies.

Where Does The Cloud Come Into Picture?

DevOps fast-tracks the growth in cloud infrastructure needs far beyond what conventional application development methods may have required. As the organization shifts from monthly to daily releases, the infra needs keep scaling, often in an unplanned manner.

If DevOps is the most significant transformation in the IT process in decades, renting infrastructure on demand was the most disruptive transformation in IT operations. With the change from traditional data centers to the public cloud, infrastructure is now leveraged like a utility. Like any other utility, there is a waste here too. (Think: leaving the fans on or your lights on when you are not home.)

The extra cloud costs encompass several interrelated problems: ongoing services when they do not need to be, wrongly sized infrastructure, orphaned resources, and shadow IT. People leveraging AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform are either already feeling the pressure — or soon will. Since DevOps teams are primarily cloud users in many organizations, DevOps cloud cost control processes must become a priority in every organization.

Why Is It So Challenging For Organizations To Get Their Cloud Costs Under Control?

In an excellent analysis on CIO.com, the following three challenges were highlighted :

  1. Playing too safe with Cloud Provisioning:

    During most of the primary generations of public cloud initiatives, the goal of the DevOps team was the development speed and quality of the solution. In the standard three-way trade-off of products, organizations can accomplish two of three goals – speed, quality, and low-cost – but not all three. Often, low cost has been the odd-man-out. With a “better-safe-than-sorry” attitude, several DevOps teams habitually purchased more cloud capacity and functionality than their solutions needed. More capacity means more cost.

  2.  Complex public cloud offerings:

    As public cloud platforms like AWS and Microsoft Azure are maturing, their portfolios of service options have radically grown. For example, AWS catalogs roughly 150 products grouped under 20 categories (compute, database, developer tools, AI, analytics, storage, and so forth). This sort of portfolio makes for roughly a million distinct potential service configurations. Incorporate frequent price changes for services and picking the best and most cost-effective public cloud options make assessing cell-phone plans look like child’s play. More complexity often means poor choices that drive higher costs.

  3. Lack of transparency and effective analysis:

    Organizations don’t have good visibility into how much infrastructure their cloud apps require to provide the necessary functionality and service levels. Without tools that provide such analysis, organizations can’t pick the best options, right-size existing public cloud deployments, or eliminate “deadwood” cloud apps that never got eliminated as DevOps teams moved on to create new cloud solutions. It’s time for organizations to get serious about optimizing and controlling their use of cloud resources and – in so doing – cutting unnecessary public cloud costs. To do this, they must utilize analytics tools and services that can offer actionable data about their cloud deployments and aid them to traverse through the jungle of public cloud service and pricing options.

The Cultural Behavior of Controlled Costs

While Continuous Cost Control is an idea that organizations must apply to development and operations practices right through all project phases, organizations can do a few things to begin a cultural behavior of controlled costs. Build a mindset and apply the principles of DevOps to control cloud costs.

  • Holistic Thinking: In DevOps, organizations need to think about the environment as a whole. Organizations have budgets. Technology teams have budgets. Whether you care or not, that also implies that DevOps has a budget, it needs to stay within. At some point, the infrastructure cost must come under scrutiny.
  • No silos: No silos imply not only no communication silos but also no silos of access. This applies to cloud cost control when it comes to challenges such as absconding compute instances running when they’re not required. If only one person in the organization possesses the ability to turn instances on and off, then that’s an undesirable single point of failure.
    The solution is removing the control silo by enabling users to access their instances to turn them on as and when they require them, utilizing governance via user roles and policies to make sure that cost control strategies remain uninhibited.
  • Quick and Valuable Feedback: In eradicating cloud waste, the feedback required is – where is waste occurring? Are your instances appropriately sized? Are they functioning when they don’t need to be? Are there orphaned resources eating the budget?
    Valuable feedback can also come in total cost savings, percentages of time instances were shut down over the previous month, and overall coverage of your cost optimization efforts.  Reporting on what is working helps organizations choose how to address the challenges. Organizations need monitoring tools to discover the answers to these questions.

Following this cultural behavior shift, DevOps teams can transition from preserving, archiving, and destroying data to collecting and utilizing it for data-driven insights. This transformation in mindset toward cloud removes constraints and enables to innovate faster and more susainably.

Act Now

Inspect your DevOps processes today and see how you can integrate a DevOps cloud cost control mindset. Consider automating cost control to lessen your cloud expenses and make your CFO’s life happier.

December 9, 2020 DevOps No comments yet

Exploring Serverless Technologies

Companies made the inevitable transition to cloud computing as it was scalable and required less infrastructure expenditure. All they needed was a remote virtual server that could be physically in a data center miles away or continents apart.

However, as the dependency on virtual servers increased, companies found it difficult and time-consuming to manage their software stacks in a distributed environment. It also started becoming expensive as developers over-provisioned server resources to manage traffic or activity spike, which went underutilized at most times.

To achieve a cost-effective and manageable solution, developers building cloud products or web apps started to turn towards serverless technologies.

Exploring Serverless Technologies

Serverless computing enabled these developers to write and deploy code without worrying about the infrastructure. The code was run in a stateless container and was triggered during events such as a file upload or an alert, or during an HTTP request.

That’s not all; serverless technology allowed developers to build a complete stack of serverless applications and serverless frameworks that would drive how the serverless applications should be built. They could also build serverless databases. So, there was no pressure of provisioning or maintaining a database.

According to Gartner, more than 20% of global companies would have deployed serverless technology by the end of 2020.

However, what does it mean for business, and how is it beneficial to end-users?

Let’s explore to know more.

How Can Serverless Technologies Benefit Businesses?

  1. Reduces dependency on backend infrastructure: 

    Developers are often bogged down by roadblocks such as provisioning, configuring, and managing backend infrastructure. Serverless technology removes that stress. It ensures that the developer focuses only on developing and deploying application code. The service provider looks after the provisioning, managing, and scaling of the infrastructure. There are two types of serverless computing:

    • Backend-as-a-service (BaaS): In this case, the developer does not have to create a backend for the databases, storage, authentication, etc. for each of the apps they build. They can link them all by using SDKs and APIs provided by the service provider. They can focus on the front-end and the user experience they provide.
    • Function-as-a-service (FaaS): In this case, the applications are separated into individual functions. The service provider manages the execution. This reduces the complexity of managing applications and improves productivity and agility in the development process.

  2. Reduces overhead costs:

    Serverless technologies are, obviously, an apt solution for companies who want to cut their overhead expenses. It does not require the same level of maintenance or human resources as technologies dependent on servers.  In fact, since developers do not have to worry about building the infrastructure from scratch, they can focus on managing the front-end. The other advantage of adopting serverless technologies is that infrastructure is priced based on usage. So, if the code is not running, the company does not have to pay for it. They just have to pay for the number of executions and the memory usage. This also becomes a valuable benefit for the end-users of the product or app when it passes into their hands.

  3. Scalability is events-based:

    Events in this context could mean uploading a new file or a video or an email being sent through an email sending service. These events change based on situations. Scalability cannot always be predicted. Hence, over-purchasing the server resources and underutilizing, while the norm, isn’t a viable solution. With serverless technologies, companies need not worry about scalability. The scalability depends upon an event. Every time an event occurs, a code is executed in response. This saves the company from spending on unnecessary infrastructure and resources.

  4. Reduces latency:

    Latency issues are a nightmare for developers. Imagine an application taking hours to download a file or an image. The end-user might lose patience with the application. Especially in the context of today’s digital consumer, speed is critical. According to Walmart, even a one-second improvement in page load time can improve conversions by 2%. One of the reasons for latency is the distance between the client’s device and the server responding to it. However, serverless technology can address this issue. Serverless technologies thrive on edge locations that are close to the end-user. So, the information doesn’t have to travel far. This allows for faster exchange of information to fix the latency issue.

  5. Faster go-to-market: 

    As the backend and other technical bottlenecks are taken care of, the developer can focus on writing the application code and deploying it. According to a survey by Dashbird, companies can save four developer work days by taking the serverless route. Even the delivery speed has reportedly been improved by 77% after using serverless technology. Developers also get time to experiment more and launch innovative products rapidly. This can add value to the business and give the company a competitive advantage over others.

How Can Serverless Technologies Benefit End-Users?

Considering that serverless technologies enable companies to experiment and create innovative products, there is an indirect advantage for end-users too. They are able to enjoy new features in their products quicker than before and with little or no latency issues, they are likely to experience a more seamless experience. Some serverless apps also offer client-side caching. So, even if there is no internet connectivity, the user can still enjoy the app’s experience offline. It’s fast, cheap, and more innovative. What’s not to like?

Notes of Caution:

Sophistication in product design and architecture have become crucial to ensure an appropriate coming together of the various elements to create a unified, seamless product or app experience for the end-users.

It’s also clear that the dependency on the cloud vendors increases as they manage everything from administrative functions to security. The internal teams lose some control over the technology and overall process. Obviously, it’s crucial to find the right vendor considering the criticality to the process.

But once appropriate care is taken, serverless technology promises to reduce operational costs and improve efficiency for great benefit and impact.

December 8, 2020 Cloud No comments yet

An eCommerce Adoption Roadmap

In the age of “shelter at home” and “social distancing”, eCommerce adoption is no longer just an option but a necessity. Most offline businesses have now been forced to make a move to online selling platforms. Even the biggest stores that have been in business for many years are adopting online channels.

There have been changes in consumer behavior as well. As per a survey by CNBC, about 85% of consumers now prefer online shopping over brick-and-mortar shops.
ecommerce adoption roadmap
But while rushing to join the eCommerce bandwagon, you may miss out on some important steps that might hurt your business in the long-run. Although, in essence, having an eCommerce store is similar to having an offline store, there are many things that differentiate the two.

To make sure your online business soars like your offline business, you must keep a few things in mind.

With an online business, you need to be proactive rather than reactive. Having a well-thought-out and specified roadmap can be the difference-maker. You need to identify your goals and then based on these goals, you need to form an actionable plan or a strong roadmap. Perhaps, the critical difference is just how central technology becomes in an online model as compared to the offline models.

In this article, we will discuss the technical elements needed to shift from a purely offline model to an eCommerce platform.

First, Why eCommerce?

Sure, some still need this question answered. So, here goes.

The biggest benefit of adopting eCommerce is that you get the opportunity to connect with a wider audience. Since the majority of people own smartphones these days, eCommerce can give you the power to be in people’s pockets. They don’t have to go around searching for your store. Instead, your potential customers can simply access your products at their fingertips.

Another significant benefit of adopting eCommerce is the lower setup cost as compared to a brick-and-mortar store with its associated real-estate investments. Moreover, eCommerce gives you the opportunity to create innovative, and impactful, promotions. Also, as your online customer testimonials are available for billions of people to read, it helps your credibility.

Hopefully, that will settle the “Why?” question. Now on to the “How?”

An eCommerce Roadmap

By focusing on the key elements mentioned below, you can create a great eCommerce adoption roadmap – 

  • Set up an online store:

    • The first thing you need to do when making a switch to an online store is to have a website or platform to showcase your products. There are tools aplenty and multiple sales channels that you can use to easily set up your online store. Platforms like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, etc. are quite popular in this segment. 

    But beyond the eCommerce engine, you must focus on the experience you provide your visitors. This brings the spotlight on the themes or website templates and elements that you use. Remember, how your website looks and how it allows the visitors to browse, search, and interact will be a crucial part of your store’s online presence.

  • Create the essential pages:

    • Without getting too caught up in the frills of setting up an online store, you must focus on creating those essential website pages that clearly showcase your products and services. 

    First, focus on the basics and create an online store that makes it easy for people to explore and find what they are looking for. Providing visitors the right information at the right stage will help them progress in the buying journey. 

    Some of the essential pages include the homepage, product pages, return/exchange, contact, and shipping. Your homepage should be able to help visitors easily dive into the entire store and discover what they need as well as any offers or promotions. The product pages on your online store must be detailed, compelling, and including high-quality product images. The shipping page must be capable of answering some of the common FAQs regarding shipping.

    Communication is key. Your online visitors should be able to easily get in touch with you or resolve their queries using the Contact page. The return/exchange page should help customers get details about your return/exchange policies. This is also a good time to explore adding options like AI-enabled chatbots and smart features that assist your customers while helping you stand out.

  • Creating an online presence:

    • After setting up an online store/website, the next step is to inform your customers about it by creating an online presence. You need to reach out to your target audience with the right messaging on the channels that they prefer.

    For doing it, first, analyze the market and figure out who your audience is and where do they hang out in the online space. Depending on your target audience, you can make use of various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, or Quora. These social media platforms allow you to interact with your potential buyers and sell your products to them. After developing a good following on social media sites, you can directly sell products from your social media handles as well.

    Another effective strategy is to leverage the power of email. By using gated content that delivers value to your users, you can collect emails of people which you can then use to send personalized messages or campaigns. You can also use paid advertisements like Google ads, Facebook ads, or YouTube ads to promote your online marketplace. 

     

    On the technology front, this is also a good time to consider the value of marketing automation, email marketing, and CRM solutions that integrate with your web presence. This will allow you to keep track of and build relationships with your target customers over time.

  • Setting up payments

    • This is a critical step. Since you’ll be dealing with a lot of financial transactions, you must choose a secure payment solution. Rising consumer awareness and an increase in the number of cybercrimes means that you must be extra careful while setting up a payment method. Customers want convenient payment processes as well as security.

  • Order fulfillment

    • Order fulfillment first requires inventory management. For an online store, you must be aware of your inventory at all times. Integrating your systems with solutions like ERP and supply chain systems will allow the site to be in sync with the orders being placed. This tight integration also provides the customers with transparent visibility into the delivery status at all times. 

  • Customer service

    • Irrespective of how big or small your online store is, customer service can be crucial. Your customer service solutions should be capable of handling all customer queries and should also be aware of all company policies. You can also look at utilizing smart chatbots on your eCommerce website for greater impact.

    Of course, this is just scratching the surface. You need to think about hosting the site, data management, and including smart data-driven analytics into the operational processes. The technology choices are extremely vast and they can have a profound impact at every stage of this process. It’s only normal to be overwhelmed by the scale of the task. That’s where, if you’d like any help with your eCommerce setup then ThinkSys could help.

    October 21, 2020 Development No comments yet

    Native Apps, Hybrid Apps, or Progressive Web Development

    As per the latest data from GSMA Intelligence, there are 5.21 billion unique mobile phone users in the world today. That’s a huge market! It doesn’t matter if you have a well-established business or if you are just starting out. Having a mobile application to complement your business offerings is now essential.

    But once you decide to launch your mobile app, you are faced with some choices.

    Whether to go with native, hybrid, or progressive web apps? Which one would be the most suitable for my business? What’s the difference between these three anyway?

    To be successful, your mobile strategy should be aligned with your business objectives. So, deciding what to go for could be a defining factor for your success.

    Native Apps, Hybrid Apps, or Progressive Web Development - Exploring the When and Why

    To help you figure out the answers to these questions, we would be doing a detailed comparison of native, hybrid, and progressive web apps in this article. We’ll also help you figure out the when and why of all three. So, let’s get started.

    What are Native Apps?

    The term ‘Native’ is simply to signify that the app is designed natively for the OS on your smartphone. The native apps are designed to work specifically on one platform or system. Think of apps built specifically for either Android or iOS devices.

    Benefits of Native Apps:

    The following are the benefits of native apps:

    • Native apps can offer the fastest, most reliable, and most responsive experience to users.
    • Native apps may not require constant access to the internet.
    • Native apps support push notifications out of the box. These notifications can be triggered by the native apps to increase user engagement.
    • These apps can be downloaded directly to the device (Android or iOS) without the need for looking for a supported browser.
    • These apps are quicker and more responsive as they have access to system resources. Native apps can seamlessly access device components like camera, location, microphone, sensors, swipe gestures, etc. to offer a better user experience.
    • These apps are easier to discover since they receive complete support from official app stores.
    • Native apps offer a higher scope of integration with the device’s features.
    • They often have better quality, security, and compatibility because these apps are approved by respective operating systems.
    • Native apps are usually easier to build because of an abundance of developer tools available in the market.

    Drawbacks of Native Apps:

    The following are the problems with native apps:

    • Native apps generally have higher upfront costs as compared to other apps. Since these apps need to be developed for both iOS and Android separately, it increases development costs because you will need resources with skills in each area. This will also, eventually, impact the maintenance costs.
    • These apps need to be updated regularly to retain users. Moreover, updating the app regularly can be an expensive process.
    • These apps are not ideal for many simple operations because of the costs involved. It doesn’t make sense to use native apps for simple operations that don’t require native capabilities or rich user experience.
    • The process of obtaining approval from the app stores (Android and iOS) can sometimes be quite lengthy.

    What are Hybrid Apps?

    Hybrid apps are installed like native apps but they are actually web apps on the inside, thus combining the elements of both web and native apps. These apps give you the convenience of a native app along with the connectivity and power of a web app.

    Hybrid apps are built using technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and run in something called webview which is a simplified browser within your app.

    Benefits of Hybrid Apps:

    The following are the benefits of hybrid apps:

    • Hybrid apps are built using a single codebase. This allows them to be quickly ported to other operating systems. So, you need to make only one app and make a few tweaks to it to make it work on both iOS and Android.
    • Cost-effectiveness is one of the major benefits of using a hybrid app because these apps give you the benefit of developing native-like apps only at a fraction of the cost of a native app.
    • These apps are faster to develop than a native app since hybrid apps are basically web apps that are packaged in a native shell.
    • Since they are quicker to develop, hybrid apps are ideal for people who want to release their apps on a tight deadline.
    • Since hybrid apps have some elements of native apps, they are capable of utilizing your system resources (like camera, sensors, etc.) close to how a native app would.
    • Working with a single codebase gives the advantage of not having to hire different developers for iOS and Android.

    Drawbacks of Hybrid Apps:

    The following are the problems with hybrid apps:

    • The most common and biggest issue found with hybrid apps is a lack of performance.
    • Cross-platform development is tough in the case of hybrid apps. Getting your app to run optimally on each platform can be difficult.
    • Swiping gestures and some similar features might not always work properly in a hybrid app.
    • Hybrid apps require an internet connection at all times since they are basically repurposed web apps.
    • The hybrid apps may require plugins to make full use of your device resources.
    • In hybrid apps, the process of obtaining approval from the respective app stores (Android and iOS) can be lengthy at times.

    What are Progressive Web Apps?

    Progressive web apps (PWAs) are quite similar to hybrid apps, with the key difference being the fact that they are not distributed through native app stores.

    Just like a hybrid app, PWAs take elements of native apps and web apps. These apps merge both elements into an accessible web application that can work both with and without the internet.

    PWAs enhance the functionality of traditional web apps by giving it the ability to send push notifications, work offline, and even load on the home screen.

    PWAs run in the browser like a traditional web app but they may or may not require an active internet connection. These apps work by storing information in a web browser’s cache which can later be recalled for quick offline access.

    Benefits of Progressive Web Apps(PWAs):

    The following are the benefits of PWAs:

    • PWAs can work in any supported browser and provide good offline access.
    • They are also much quicker to load than regular web apps. This is a crucial factor for increasing user retention on the app.
    • PWAs can be built in a shorter time span and at lower costs than a native app.
    • Since these are built on a standard codebase, PWAs are cross-platform compatible. You won’t have to redesign the app for Android or iOS separately.
    • PWAs also have access to phone resources like a native app.

    Drawbacks of Progressive Web Apps(PWAs)

    The following are the problems with PWAs:

    • Even though PWAs have access to many system resources, they don’t have the access to all of your system resources that a native app does.
    • PWAs are comparatively more demanding on the battery than native or hybrid apps.
    • Since PWAs cannot access contacts or Bluetooth, they are unable to give a deeply personal response to users.
    • PWAs cannot be distributed through app stores and hence these apps are not ideal for businesses that want to reach the audience on Android and iOS.
    • PWAs are not ideal for businesses looking to implement an in-app monetization strategy.

    When and why to choose Native Apps, Hybrid Apps, or Progressive Web Apps(PWAs)?

    To set up your app for success, you must carefully choose between native, hybrid, or progressive web apps. Here are the factors you must keep in mind while making your choice:

    • Your mobile app should have a clear purpose in order to succeed. You must think about the pain points of your customers and choose an app built to address that. The features and capabilities of your app must be user-driven. A native app could provide better functionality and excellent user experience than a hybrid app or PWA.
    • The budget is also an important factor to consider. You must choose an app type that fits within your budget. It can be done by choosing the right app type at the beginning itself. Choosing a PWA or hybrid app could often be more cost-effective than a native app.
    • Keep the long-term vision in mind while choosing your app. If you want to offer regular updates in your app then going with a native app could be the better choice. Making the right choice for the app type will allow you to account in advance for all the resources that you might need for future releases and maintenance updates.
    • Similarly, if you want to quickly release your app in the market, then PWA or hybrid app can do that for you. If you want to launch your app in respective app stores then a hybrid app would be the better option to choose than the PWA.

    It’s a bit of a cliché, but true anyway, that the choice is defined by your specific needs and circumstances. We hope the information contained here will help you make the right choice!

    October 7, 2020 Development No comments yet

    What Has Changed In The Security Considerations Of Enterprise Products?

    Ever since the work from home wave was settled in due to the pandemic, companies are increasingly worried about infrastructure and cybersecurity. The shift to working from home was so sudden that companies had very little time to ensure that employees get trained or equipped to comply with the security policies. To add to the woes, employees face the prospect of being able to receive little support from distributed IT teams during the shift to remote working. The result? Employees faced several challenges ranging from phishing attacks from external sources to unchecked home routers, and vulnerabilities of cloud-based and other tools. 

    What Has Changed In The Security Considerations Of Enterprise Products

    In fact, according to Proofpoint, phishing has increased ever since the pandemic began, making enterprise products vulnerable to security threats. Over 70% of emails had malware, and 30% aimed to steal the victim’s credentials.

    Companies have come to realize that security can no longer be limited to the enterprise tools they use within the office walls. It has to be extended outside the boundaries of offices. That’s why over 90% of enterprises have planned to invest more in securing telework over the next two years. 

    While the ramping up of security will take time, companies can begin to address the security challenges in some significant ways right away.

    5 Things Companies Must Do To Improve The Security Of Enterprise Products

    1. Use Secure VPN:

      Although VPN encrypts internet traffic and makes it unreadable to hackers and internet service providers, some of them can be susceptible to bugs. This could compromise the entire network and open the doors for hackers. According to CISA, using VPNs for telework exposes it to vulnerabilities and cyber-attacks. Use a trusted VPN service provider. To safeguard the VPN access, ask the users to limit usage to only business purposes. Ensure that the VPN servers are up to date and use two-factor authentication to secure the VPN. Create awareness about appropriate and updated password policies, so employees know how to safeguard the VPN from their end. 

    2. Use Secure and Approved Cloud Services:

      Very few technologies have seen adoption as quickly as cloud computing. Cloud-based services offer companies the benefit of minimizing investment on infrastructure and legacy systems and maximize their productivity and efficiency. Ever since employees have shifted to work from home, cloud-based services have been lauded for offering them convenience and easy access. However, like all technologies, the cloud is also vulnerable to cyber threats. The onus lies on the IT security team that they verify the third-party cloud storage and other services carefully to safeguard the assets of the company. Employees must only use services that are verified and approved by the IT team. Of course, they must also be discouraged to use public Wi-Fi and instead use secured access methods like VPN to protect the data on the cloud.

    3. Update Installed Software Regularly:

      Employees often click on cancel or a maybe later option when they receive notifications to update the installed software. They do it to avoid wasting time until the software is updated or because they are unaware of its importance. That’s where the IT teams have to intervene. They have to ensure that the employees update their software frequently to protect against any kind of security hazards for the company. Insignificant as it might seem, software updates are critical because they patch the security holes in the software and protect it from hackers and malware. The update removes all the outdated features and improves the stability of the software. Companies must ensure that the employees understand the significance of software updates and follow the precise protocols prescribed by the IT teams. 

    4. Secure the Router:

      Home routers are often vulnerable to malicious activities and cyber-attack. Hackers can get access to the user’s login credentials through the routers and can compromise the entire network and all the links of the chain after that. Employees must be made aware of that so they can protect their home network. The first step is to encourage employees to manage their passwords better. Employees should also be asked to set the highest available level of encryption to restrict inbound and outbound traffic. For example, employees can be asked to set WPA3 encryption to protect personal, enterprise, and IoT devices. The IT team must make securing the home routers the priority and extend guidance to help employees with it.

    5. Use Encrypted Tools for Communication:

      Sometimes important and sensitive data may have to be exchanged between the team members and clients via messenger apps, collaboration tools, and emails. Companies must ensure that these communications are secured by end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption makes the information unreadable to any third party; that is when two or more devices communicate, the information is exchanged in the form of a secret code. So, nobody can read it other than the people involved in the communication. Encrypted communication safeguards the data from tampering. Make it mandatory for all employees to use only encrypted communication channels to exchange sensitive data.

    Conclusion:

    These are a few methods that companies can implement to improve cybersecurity. As companies contemplate making work from home a permanent option for a large number of its employees, they have to build a culture of conscious employees who understand and follow the cybersecurity guidelines laid down by the IT team. Some ways to create that mindset include:

    • Establishing easy-to-follow best practices to make cybersecurity a priority.
    • Conduct regular training sessions or eLearning sessions to drive the importance of security.
    • Create constant awareness through emails and other media.
    • Offer accessible remote support  and train employees to troubleshoot problems on their own.

    It’s important to ensure that all the employees follow these guidelines stringently. This will also assure your customers that their data is safe and will give the required protection to your operations too. 

    September 22, 2020 Security No comments yet

    React Testing Library

    Among the various front-end development libraries, React is an important one and is frequently used by developers to build seamless and quality products. From enabling clear programming to being backed up by a strong community, this open-source JavaScript library helps deliver fast performance. However, these benefits of the software or applications are not only a result of better and clear programming. Testing also plays an integral part in validating the quality of the product as well as its speed. Currently, numerous frameworks are used to test React components, such as Jest, Enzyme and React-Testing-Library. Though the former two are well renowned among testers, React Testing Library is steadily gaining momentum, due to the various benefits it offers to the testing team, and it is this method of testing React components that we are going to discuss in detail today, to further understand its significance.’

    React Testing Library

    What is React Testing Library?

    Introduced by Kent C. Dodds, React-Testing-Library is a lightweight solution for testing React components and is commonly used in tandem with Jest. React Testing Library came into being as a replacement to Enzyme and is now encouraging better testing practices, by providing light utility functions on top of react-dom and react-dom/test-utils. It is an extremely beneficial testing library that enables testers to create a simple and complete test harness for React hooks as well as to easily refactor code going forward.

    The main objective of this library is to provide a testing experience that is similar to natively using a particular hook from within a real component. Moreover, it enables testers to focus directly on using the library to test the components and assert the results. In short, React Testing Library guides testers to think more about React testing best practices, like selectors and accessibility rather than coding. Another reason that makes it helpful is that this library works with specific element labels of the React component and not the composition of the UI.

    Want to get a better insight into the working of React Testing Library? Check out the React Testing Library examples here.

    Key Points of React Testing Library:

    From supporting new features of React to performing tests that are more focused on user behavior, there are numerous features of React Testing Library that make it more suitable for testing React components than others.

    Some of these features are:

    • It takes away excessive work required to test React components well.
    • It is backed up as well as recommended by the React community.
    • It is not React specific and can be used with Angular and other languages.
    • It enables testers to write quality tests that ensure complete accuracy.
    • Encourages applications to be more accessible.
    • It offers a way to find elements by a data-testid for elements where the text content and label don’t make sense.
    • Avoids testing the internal component state.
    • Tests how a component renders.

    The Guiding Principles of React Testing Library:

    The guiding principle of this library is the more the tests resemble the way the software is used the more confidence they can give the testing team. To ensure this, the tests written in React Testing Library closely depict the way users use the application. Other guiding principles for this testing library are:

    • It deals with DOM nodes rather than component instances.
    • Generally useful for testing individual React components or full React applications.
    • While this library is focused on react-dom, utilities are included even if they don’t directly relate to react-dom.
    • Utility implementations and APIs should be simple and flexible.

    The Need For React Testing Library:

    React Testing Library is an extremely beneficial testing library and is needed when the team of testers wants to write maintainable tests for React components, as well as when there is a need to create a test base that functions uniformly even when refactors of the components are implemented or new changes are introduced. However, the use of the React Testing Library is not limited to this. As this library is neither a test runner or framework nor is it specific to a testing framework, it is also used in the following two circumstances:

    • In cases when the tester is writing a library with one or more hooks that are not directly tied to a component.
    • Or when they have a complex hook that is difficult to test through component interactions.

    Tests Performed:

    There are various tests for your React component or React application testing that ensures that they deliver the expected performance. Among these, the following are the most crucial tests performed by the team and are hence discussed in detail:

    1. Unit Testing:
      An integral part of testing React components, unit testing is used to test the isolated part of the React application, usually done in combination with shallow rendering as well as functional testing React components. This is further executed with the assistance of an important technique of front-end unit testing react component, snapshot testing.

      2. Snapshot Tests:

      Another testing technique used to test React components in React Testing Library snapshot testing, wherein the team takes a snapshot of a React component and compares it with later versions to validate that it is bug-free, runs accurately and depicts expected user experience. The main objective of Snapshot testing is to make sure the layout of the component didn’t break when a change was implemented.

      Snapshot testing is suitable for React component testing as it allows the testing team to view the DOM output and create a snapshot at the time of the run. Moreover, this testing technique is not limited to testing implementation details or React testing library hooks and is used with other testing libraries and frameworks, like Jest, as it enables testing of JavaScript objects.

    2. Integration Tests:
      One of the most important tests performed to test React components, Integration Testing, ensures that the composition of the React components results in the desired user experience. Since writing React apps is all about composing components, Unit Testing React with Jest alone is not suitable for ensuring that the app, as well as the components, are bug-free. Integration tests validate whether different components of the app work or integrate with each other by testing individual units by combining and grouping them.
    3. End-to-End Testing:
      Performed by combining testing library React and Cypress or any other library or frameworks, end-to-end testing is another important step of the testing activities. It helps ensure that the React app works accurately and delivers the necessary functionality expected by the users. This test is a multi-step that combines multiple units and integrates the tests into one huge test.

    Other Important Tools & Libraries:

    Though React-Testing-Library is a prominent library for testing React components, it is not the only library out there. There are various other React testing tools and libraries used by the team of testers to verify the quality and accuracy of React components. A few of these are mentioned below:

    1. Jest: Adopted by large scale organizations like Uber and Airbnb, Jest is among the most popular frameworks and used by Facebook to test React components. It is also recommended by the React team, as its UI snapshot testing and complete API philosophy combines well with React.
    2. Mocha: One of the most flexible Javascript testing libraries, Mocha, just like Jest and other frameworks can be combined with Enzyme and Chai for assertion, mocking, etc. when used to test React. It is extremely configurable and offers developers complete control over how they wish to test their code.
    3. Chai: Another important library used for testing components, Chai is a Behavior Driven and Test Driven Development assertion library that can be paired with a JavaScript testing framework.
    4. Karma: Though not a testing framework or assertion library, Karma can be used to execute JavaScript code in multiple real browsers. It is a test runner that launches an HTTP server and generates HTML files. Moreover, it helps search for test files, processes them and runs assertions.
    5. Jasmine: A Behavior Driven Development (BDD) testing framework used for JavaScript tests, Jasmine, is used to test the React app or components. It does not rely on browsers, DOM, or any JavaScript framework and is traditionally used in various frameworks like Angular. That’s not all, Jasmine consists of a designated help util library that is built to make the testing workflow smoother.
    6. Enzyme: One of the most common frameworks usually discussed along with React Testing Enzyme is not a testing framework, but rather a testing Utility for React that enables testers to easily test outputs of components, abstracting the rendered component. Moreover, it allows the team to manipulate, traverse, and in some cases stimulate runtime. In short, it can help the team React test render components, find elements, and interact with them.
    7. React Test Utils and Test Renderer: Another collection of useful utilities in React, React test renderer is used in identifying and throwing an error using any testing library Jest Dom for example. React-test-renderer typescript enables the team to render React components into pure JavaScript objects without depending on DOM. It can support the basic functionality needed for testing React components and offers advantages that it is in the same repository as the main React package and can work with its latest versions.
    8. Cypress IO: A JavaScript end-to-end testing framework, Cypress is easy to set-up, write, and debug tests in the browser. It is an extremely useful framework that enables teams to perform end-to-end React application testing, while simultaneously making the process easy. It has a built-in parallelization and load balancing, which makes debugging tests in CI easier too.

    Conclusion:

    Testing, be it for a React component, application or software, is crucial to validate the quality, functionality, as well as UX & UI. React Testing Library is among the various testing frameworks that are helping testers create apps that are suitable for users worldwide. From remarkable React testing library accessibility to a scalable React test environment, label text features, and more, this front-end testing framework offers a wide range of advantages, which is making it popular among testers. So, whether you are using the Jest test function or React testing library, testing React components and applications is easier with all.

    Want to understand the scope of React Acceptance Testing? Click here.

    August 28, 2020 Quality Assurance Testing No comments yet

    AWS and Azure: The Business Enablers for 2020

    A few weeks ago Amazon Web Services announced its new industrial IoT support platform – AWS IoT Sitewise. Not long before that, Microsoft Azure launched a Healthcare Emergency Response Solution. Even in tough times, these two cloud services have stayed committed to growth.

    Now, product development organizations consist of remote and distributed teams of skilled and cost-effective talent from across the world. Of course, the pandemic has driven the sudden dominance of the cloud. Expanded “Work from home” measures are accelerating cloud adoption.

    In that scenario, both AWS and Azure have much to offer. While AWS is committed to aiding businesses of all kinds with flexibility and scalability, Azure has been allowing businesses to develop and deploy their services uninterrupted.

    azure and AWS

    Some businesses are still struggling with stepping up to cloud adoption. The lack of technical experience has put them in a peculiar situation. They are skeptical about accepting the cloud as the new normal, but they cannot deny its necessity.

    For such companies, let’s take a look at how both AWS and Azure can accelerate business impact now.

    Based on these benefits, organizations can know AWS and Azure better. They may thus be able to make a choice based on what works best for them.

    • Native Tools and services: Over, time AWS and Azure, both have evolved from being mere cloud computing and storage facilitators. AWS is capable of providing complex services that take care of database management, software development assistance, networking, mobility, analytics, etc. On the other hand, Azure offers an array of specific applications for business needs. These applications have been aiding various industries like healthcare, financial service, and even governments. The native tools and services provided by AWS and Azure have been aiding businesses with cloud computing, security, administrative compliance, and access to a new age technology stack, among other benefits. Businesses of all sizes can be relieved of the burden of picking and investing in good infrastructure and third-party tools from multiple vendors. Moreover, native tools and services help with better monitoring and tracking at different stages of management and administration. These are savings in both capital and operational expenditure for the businesses.
    • Storage Capacity: Let’s start with AWS. In the storage front, AWS can handle a business’ current needs and allow future growth as well. The storage capacity is practically unlimited. AWS saves businesses from crippling data storage limits. The distributed cloud storage also makes the data less vulnerable to malware or cybersecurity issues. More on that later. These storage services offered by AWS are very well handled by the AWS Storage Gateway. For the same context, Azure offers a platform called the Azure Storage platform. This cloud storage solution has been built to handle new-age software needs like scalability, virtual machine handling, communication data, etc. Azure storage is meant to offer qualities like – durable storage, high availability, data security, easy accessibility, and more
    • Security: Security is front and center for both services. Azure, for instance with its multiple compliance certifications, is deemed safe for even high-risk industries. That is the reason, many governments and healthcare organizations adopt it for cloud services. With features like network security, key logs, multi-factor authentication among others, Azure ensures that both the business services and the end-users are safe. Security with AWS is about safe information exchange, trusted infrastructures, etc. AWS has multiple data centers spread out globally. The business and end-user data and processes are all safe and secure. AWS offers security features like Identity Access Management, Cloud Trail, S3 security, etc. All of these come together to relieve businesses of all their security concerns.
    • Agility: The core idea behind business agility is faster development and provisioning for future changes of direction. With practices like DevOps, agile principles are wedded to automation and cloud services. Obviously, it makes sense for two of the most popular cloud services to provide agile features from the get-go. AWS, for instance, offers all its resources at one stop. This makes development faster and more agile. With its storage capabilities, security assurance, and reliable infrastructure, AWS can encourage even conventionally non-agile organizations to attain agility at scale. Azure too has been allowing businesses to evolve from their legacy processes and bring business agility with a move to the cloud. Applications can be built, managed, and deployed in minimal time. Both AWS and Azure support DevOps along with technologies like Microservices, Containers, Serverless, etc. This means that even for more futuristic products and services, provisions for agile development are already in place.
    • Affordability: With all these services, both AWS and Azure can help businesses achieve acceleration. In addition, even for start-ups, they can prove to be very cost-effective. AWS offers infrastructure on demand. This means that the business can use whatever resources they need for however long they need them. Azure is capable of scaling its services and resources as per the business size and needs. The pay-as-you-go price model allows small scale businesses to employ only the required services and resources. In fact, both AWS and Azure, encourage businesses to optimize resource utilization. They offer the preferred Operating System, technology stack, network management, etc. at an affordable price and 100% brand reliability from Amazon and Microsoft.

    Conclusion:

    Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have been giants in the cloud-computing game. Both have vast experience and committed customer bases. There is also the trust that comes with the Microsoft and Amazon brands. Both cloud solutions are committed to helping businesses of all scales and sizes to evolve at a steady pace. The cloud adoption choice has never been easier for organizations to make. The hard part is separating the vendors. That often comes down to the specific features you want to use and the commercial deal available to you at that time. One thing is sure. AWS or Azure are both proven solutions.

    August 24, 2020 AWS, Azure No comments yet

    React Native Vs Flutter App Development

    The past few years ushered us into the era of mobile applications, where mobile apps have become an integral part of our everyday life. Be it Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, Uber, Skype, or more mobile applications are trending excessively in this day and age. However, with this increasing dependency on mobile applications, the need for niche technologies, frameworks, and platforms is also rapidly increasing, giving way to the advent of new frameworks and platforms that allow developers to create cross-platform apps that are suitable for all platforms. Moreover, these two frameworks are competing against each other to prove their worth, making Flutter Vs React Native the most trending topics of the year.

    From simplifying the app development process to making them efficient, these frameworks are helping reduce the complexity of mobile application development and are hence trending among developers. Among these, Flutter and React Native are the two most popular Cross-platform Mobile App Development Frameworks that are enabling developers to create cross-platform mobile applications that work seamlessly across various platforms and devices.

    Reactnative vs Flutter

    So, let’s try to determine, “What is the difference between Flutter and React Native?” and answer the important question, “Will Flutter replace React Native?”. But before we delve deep into this discussion on React Native vs Flutter, it is important that we understand the need for cross-platform development frameworks.  

    The Need for Cross-Platform Mobile Development Framework:

    Nowadays, Android and iOS are two of the most widely used mobile platforms, with a completely different application development process. Android requires developers with extensive knowledge of Java or Kotlin, whereas iOS needs developers well versed in Swift programming language, making the development process expensive and time-consuming.

    Cross-platform app development came into the inception to overcome this drawback and has become the need of the hour. Industries are using frameworks like React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, PhoneGap, and more, to create cross-platform applications, as they enable a single team to create apps with a single code base that works on multiple operating systems (OS), like iOS and Android. Due to this, most of the applications developed today are either cross-platform or hybrid and can run seamlessly on iOS and Android. Other advantages offered by cross-platform mobile application development frameworks are:

    • It offers UX uniformity.
    • Ideal for prototyping.
    • Requires one team to create one product for two or more platforms.
    • The code can be reused across platforms.
    • Quicker Development.
    • Easier Implementation.

    Now that we know the reason for the shift from native app development to cross-platform and hybrid app development, let’s compare the two important cross-platform mobile app development technology.

    React Native: Understanding the Basics:

    Launched by Facebook in 2015, React Native is an open-source JavaScript framework built upon the React library and used to build natively rendering, mobile applications for iOS and Android. One of the most reliable and popular JavaScript frameworks used for developing mobile apps, React Native combines native components with React, the best-in-class JavaScript library for building the User Interface (UI). React Native enables developers to create react native apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux, though the latter two require dependency managers like HomeBrew package manager.

    Used by Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb, Skype, Tesla, Walmart, etc. and backed up by a huge developer community, React Native popularity is tremendous due to its ability to build applications efficiently, in less time as well as its use of Node Package Manager (NPM) for installation, excellent UI rendering, GPU oriented application development, seamless integration and quick load time, etc. Additionally, its features like platform-specific code and hot reload make it a common choice for developers for mobile application development.

    What is Flutter App Development?

    Flutter, one of the biggest React Native competitors, is a free and open-source mobile UI framework created by Google and released in 2017. Though new to the spectrum of mobile application development, it is gaining popularity and momentum among web and mobile developers for creating native applications, with a single codebase. In short, with Flutter, developers can use one programming language and codebase to create two different apps for different platforms.

    Unlike React Native, Flutter does not use JavaScript, but rather a less known programming language Dart, which was created by Google in 2011. Dart programming language is focused on front-end development and can be used to create applications for both web and mobile. Though most of the systems are implemented in Dart, the factor that differentiates Flutter from other mobile application SDK is that it has a thin layer of C++ or C. Moreover, it is supported on Android Studio, IntelliJ Idea & Visual studio code.

    Difference between Flutter and React native: What to Choose?

    From being open-sourced, fast and free to offering excellent UI support and native-like experience, React Native and Flutter, two major competitors offering cross-platform solutions, share various similarities. However, there are certain aspects of these two frameworks that make one framework superior from the other, which will be highlighted in the following comparison:

    1. Programming Languages: Flutter Dart vs React Native JavaScript

      2. A major advantage of using cross-platform mobile app development frameworks is it allows developers to create applications for both iOS and Android using a single programming language.

      • Flutter uses Dart programming language to create a Flutter app. Though new for mobile application developers, Dart is easy-to-use for developers experienced in different OOP languages such as Java and C++.
      • React Native: Uses JavaScript to build cross-platform apps. Extremely popular among developers, this programming language helps web developers build apps with little training and hence is a winner compared to Flutter. 
    2. User Interface:

      3. As React Native is purely focused on UI design, it has a large number of React UI components that are more extensive than that of Flutter. This is because application development with React Native is highly based on native components, whereas Flutter works flawlessly with the owner widget sets. One advantage of these widgets is that they prevent the developer from being dependent on third-party UI libraries. 

    3. Development Time: 

      4. Development time and process are the two most critical aspects that need consideration during mobile application development. Flutter, prominently known for fast and simple development, is lauded for its hot reload feature, which enables developers to instantly view changes and implement modifications. Moreover, it provides a full suite of extensible components that are built from scratch. Whereas, React Native, though popular, relies heavily on third-party libraries, which becomes makes the process comparatively slower. 

    4. React Native Vs. Flutter Performance: 

      5. React Native, though popular for providing high-quality user experience, is considered less suitable for application development because of its architecture, which impacts its performance and makes it slower. Whereas, Flutter’s ability to reuse the same code for creating applications for different platforms as well as its use of widgets and GPU to render it on apps on the screen helps create apps with best-in-class performance and speed.

    5. Documentation & Toolkit: 

      6. Google, like always, provides clear, structured, and in-depth documentation for their products, with Flutter being no exception. From installation to widgets, testing, more Flutter offers proper documentation for all and is backed by the Flutter team. React Native lags behind in this aspect, as it has a poorly maintained and unclear documentation, with not much explained like installation and configuration setup. Moreover, it lacks official documentation for Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD).

    6. Technical Architecture: 

      7. Another important aspect that needs consideration when comparing React Native and Flutter is technical architecture. 

      • Flux Architecture: 

      As React Native relies heavily on JS runtime environment architecture known as JavaScript bridge, it uses Facebook’s Flux architecture, which helps it to communicate with native modules. This though beneficial results in poor performance. 

      • Skia:

      On the other hand, Flutter uses Dart Framework, which has most of the components inbuilt and does not require JavaScript bridge to communicate with the native UI component. Moreover, it further uses the Skia C++ engine which consists of all the protocols, compositions, and channels needed to develop a mobile app. This independency of Flutter makes its architecture more beneficial than React Native.

    7. DevOps and CI/CD Support: 

      8. To ensure an application receives continuous feedback and is not released with bugs, it crucial to adopt Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery practices. This is ensured by Flutter, in its section on Continuous Integration and Testing, where its rich Command Line Interface (CLI) allows easy set up on CI/CD services strong CLI tools, whereas, React Native does not provide any instructions on CI/CD practices.

    8. Installation: 

      9. The installation process with Flutter is more straightforward, with the added advantage of automated checkup of system problems. On the other hand, react-native lacks a streamlining setup and configuration. 

    9. Development Tools: 

      10. Some of the tools used in both React Native and Flutter mobile application development are:

      1. Flutter: 
        • Flutter SDK.
        • DevTools.
        • Hot Reload.
      2. React:
        • Expo.
        • Redux.
        • Flow.
        • Ignite.
        • React Navigation.

      Conclusion:

      React Native is currently ruling the spectrum of cross-platform mobile application development, however, there is no doubt that Flutter is working hard to prove its worth and is slowly taking over the future mobile application development, by making the development more streamlined, introduction of new features and functionalities, as well as by saving the developer time and effort. However, it is still too soon to answer to questions like “Is Flutter better than React Native?”, as Flutter is still climbing the ladder to achieve the popularity and reliability that React Native is currently enjoying. 

    August 4, 2020 Development 3 comments