This is the second in a series of blog posts in which we outline the roadmap to TDD for your organization and how to choose the right experts for your projects. Find Part 1 here.
TDD works in very small increments of coding a test, writing the program code, and improving the code. This results in many (in fact hundreds) of automated small tests that need to be executed. This is not easy, especially when it comes to legacy code, proper unit test isolation, and other integration tests.
To ensure that the people you are going to bring on board have mastered that, you have to understand the factors to consider while collaborating with them.
Below are the important aspects that you should not ignore while hiring dedicated testers and QA team for projects based on the TDD process:
Skills Needed
Technical and Analytical Skills of Business Analysts:
Ability to analyze a set of techniques and tasks to be used to work as a liaison among stakeholders and recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.
Collecting requirements and analyzing how they’ll work as a product. And what will be the future problems they may face. According to that unit tests are defined and the acceptance criteria are defined for further development.
Technical Skills of Testers/Developers:
Writing a unit test before writing the code and able to write code sufficiently to make a failing test pass.
Expertise in “test-driven bug fixing”, i.e. when a defect is found, writes a test exposing the defect before correction.
Knows and can name several tactics to guide the writing of tests (for instance “when testing a recursive algorithm, first write a test for the recursion terminating case”).
Able to factor out reusable elements from existing unit tests, through using situation-specific testing tools.
Creating a “roadmap” of planned unit tests for macroscopic features (and revising it as necessary).
Ability to “test drive” a variety of design paradigms: event-driven, functional, and object-oriented; Also the technical domains like persistent data access, user interfaces, and computation.
Soft skills of QA manager:
Communicate properly with non-technical as well as technical people, especially explaining the technical challenges to the management team.
Understand the client provided specs and visualize a real-time business situation. He/She must also be ready for a knowledge-sharing session with either his/her team or higher management every time the situation arises.
Must also have a strong programming base to keep up with their team w.r.t. understanding what the client needs.
How To Pick the Right Team?
Evaluate your company’s methodology: If you’re a startup or an established firm looking for an overhaul in methodologies, then it’s important to determine what type of team you prefer that can successfully collaborate with your company.
Check out websites and portfolios: A company’s website is the face you can judge it by. If the website works smoothly and the interface and user experience are user-centric, it means the company pays a great deal of attention to details.
Assess the testing experience of the team: It is important to find out what types of testing a team can provide in general; what approach the team applies in each particular case, and understand what tests the team has performed on specific projects.
Find out the industry focus of tested products: The quality assurance and testing team you hire needs to be experienced in testing apps or websites similar to yours.
Compare the size/complexity of the company’s projects with yours: The size/complexity of the project also matters a lot. If a QA team has worked only on simple projects, it may not be ready to step up on a large and more complex project and test it comprehensively.
Asking The Right Questions
In-depth questions will help you learn how they create and maintain quality assurance procedures, as well as filter out what meets your requirements. Here are some examples of questions you should ask:
– What will TDD give us that we can’t get by building tests later?
This question will help determine how well they understand and practice the benefits of TDD as mentioned above in the benefits section.
– What quality assurance and testing process do you use and why?
Gauge their understanding of QA processes and whether they have experience establishing these processes. This will also include the type of model they use to design the test plan.
– What are the best practices, automation toolkits, and testing methodologies the team employs?
This will enable you to understand the general testing approaches the team uses. Whether the team knows how to do automation testing, how they use automation testing, and with what tools they conduct it.
– Do you use TDD for accessibility concerns as well?
Since accessible features are getting a lot of attention, you can ask about their plans and involvement of accessibility concerns in your project. The concerns such as “does the correct ARIA hints are used for components?” and “is the correct semantic markup being used?” can be easily unit tested.
-How will you evaluate that testing was successful?
At this stage, specific expectations of testing may be revealed. Often, expectations don’t match that can be usually obtained through testing. In this case, it’s important to explain what exactly is impossible to do and why.
-What will be the format for bug reports and testing results?
This will help you agree on a specific format of bug reporting and testing results to ensure that you have all the information you need.
Conclusion
Collaboratively discuss the complete project with the team and clear all the queries that you may have in your mind. Remember to be transparent, honest, and open about everything. Define your budget prior. Use the opportunity to build a personal connection with the offshore development agency. This rapport will decide to work with you in a better manner.
Not only the Quality Assurance team, but you can also hire highly skilled developers, designers, testers, and digital product development experts.
We follow agile methodologies like TDD to build robust custom applications for our clients. Contact us to know more about the development process and how we can help you to build and launch your application.
About Galaxy Weblinks
We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services and have hands-on experience with automation testing in agile development environments. Our engineers, QA analysts, and developers help improve security, reliability, and features to make sure your business application and IT structure scale and remain secure.
This is the first in a series of blog posts in which we outline the benefits of TDD for your organization and what are the projects to consider while adopting this agile process. Link of Part Two.
Test-Driven Development essentially lets the testing process drive the development and design of your application. This incorporates acceptance tests, functional tests, and unit tests. It leads you to create very different kinds of tests that tend to be more resilient to change in the future because you’re verifying behaviors rather than testing pieces of code.
If you are asking why TDD, we will just say that “it’s the easiest way to get both good test coverage and good quality code, which leads to 40%-80% fewer bugs in production”. Wouldn’t it be better to write the code in a manner where a bug can be spotted immediately and not after the production stage?
If this sounds good to you, let’s go to the next step. How do you successfully roll out TDD in your organization with the right team?
We’ll explore this here, as well as share some important insights on TDD.
What Are The Expected Benefits of TDD?
Better designed, extensible, and cleaner code: It helps to understand how the code will interact with other modules and will be used. It results in more maintainable code and better design decisions.
It helps in writing smaller code having single responsibility rather than monolithic procedures with multiple responsibilities. This makes the code simpler to understand.
Reduced Scrap work and Time to Repair: TDD allows problems to be detected as early as possible, which has the effect of reducing the number of bugs. De facto, the technical debt is better controlled with a reusable, maintainable, and flexible code that allows the addition of new functionalities and reduces time to repair.
Eliminates fear of change: Developers get quick alerts when a code change introduces a bug, and TDD’s tight feedback loop quickly notifies them when it’s fixed.
Better code coverage: It provides better code coverage than writing tests after the fact. Because we create code to make a specific test pass, code coverage will be close to 100%.
Faster developer feedback loop: Without TDD, developers are supposed to manually test each change to make sure that it works. With TDD, unit tests can run on-change automatically, allowing faster-debugging sessions and feedback during development.
Common Pitfalls of TDD
Time-Intensive: While TDD generally results in higher-quality code, it is often a time-consuming process. But at the same time creating and maintaining a test suite, in addition to the software itself, is a significant investment.
Many teams have seen significant reductions in defect rates, at the cost of a moderate increase in the initial development effort.
Increased Overhead: The TDD process involves a great deal of overhead in the form of unit tests. Poor choices of testing, design, or architecture strategy at the early stage can be difficult to recover later in the project. Hence, it becomes difficult or impossible to make changes in the codebase without making dozens or hundreds of existing tests fail.
Whereas, businesses that prefer to invest time in manual QA, or the ones that lack the technical resources to implement unit tests, are not the ideal candidates for TDD.
Choosing projects for TDD
Existing Project (Legacy code) And New Projects
A common TDD implementation problem rears its ugly head when an organization has inherited a system that wasn’t built with testability in mind. In such scenarios, questions arise like — Should the code be refactored? If so, how much refactoring is important to start practicing TDD in an achievable, and meaningful way?
So, if the legacy code is already out there and working, the risk associated with the technical debt is low relative to the risk of new untested work. By applying TDD to the new code you’re writing, i.e., making changes in the existing code, you minimize the risk as well as don’t increase the technical debt.
Microservices
Microservice-based architectures have far more complexities and dependencies than traditional application stacks. Creating tests for microservices-based applications and other complex architectures can be difficult due to the requirement for advanced stubbing and mocking.
A microservice-based architecture, however, presents the opportunity to leverage TDD best practices in a very efficient way. The TDD pragmatist approach becomes very useful when you think about treating the microservice as the unit, rather than the compilation unit.
Who should use it?
Most organizations simply do not have enough developers or time to cover all of their use-cases. This is especially true for enterprises that have a mix of skills and roles contributing to their projects.
Leveraging TDD helps address the issue of limited technical resources by defining tests against the contract.
With this approach, stakeholders, business analysts, testers, and other non-developer resources together can contribute to the TDD testing efforts since the Requirement Gathering phase.
Conclusion:
TDD is a process that helps you start development projects with a healthy base of tests to ensure software quality throughout the development lifecycle. It helps you to produce maintainable, testable, and efficient code. But real-world conditions do not always make TDD adoption easy. It depends totally on your product requirement and can be made easier with the kind of team you have onboard.
Contact us to know more about the development process and how we can help you to build and launch your application.
In Part Two, we enumerated the skills and factors to consider while picking the best team. And we highlighted the right questions to ask the team to ensure how your requirements will be met w.r.t. the project. About Galaxy Weblinks
We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services and have hands-on experience with automation testing in agile development environments. Our engineers, QA analysts, and developers help improve security, reliability, and features to make sure your business application and IT structure scale and remain secure.
UX deliverables are a key part of building any application/product or enhancing an existing one. They may vary depending on the methods used, project, budget, and user demands, as every product is different. This, in turn, also impacts the communication between the designer and the client. Early on in the project, before the designer can share a mockup or prototype, it is common for designers to wonder what to share with clients and how often.
‘What do I show to my clients? What do they want to see? Are they concerned about my work process? When to be an open book and when to keep things to myself?’
This article lists the 7 most common deliverables created or produced by UX designers while making a new product.
These deliverables are ‘good-to-have’ in any and every project. They keep designers on track while ensuring that the clients, project managers, and designers are on the same page.
UX deliverables provide a clear foundation to build your designs on when you’re elbow-deep in developing your application, site, or any product.
Competitive Analysis Reports
An analysis of competitor’s products to map out their existing features in a comparable way. It helps UX designers to identify opportunities to innovate in a given area and understand industry standards.
Tip: A useful starting point for identifying strengths and areas for improvement is user experience heuristics. Heuristics include readability, consistency, clarity of text and labels, efficient navigation, etc.
Personas and UX Research Reports
With personas, you can easily empathize with users throughout the design process. The most effective personas are created from observation data and in-depth user interviews of real users. A good persona supports the UX research group!
The user research reports help in communicating research aims and methods, as well as getting buy-in from stakeholders. It’s also a great tool to translate the research findings into actionable items. They help in keeping everyone on track during the research project.
Pro Tip: There are many types of user research tools and techniques available like QuestionPro or LimeSurvey (survey tools), and FullStory or Hotjar (user session recording tools).
User Flow Diagrams and Product Roadmaps
Sketches are simple depictions of a design concept. They can be quickly employed because only paper and pen are necessary for their creation. They are also easily shared between designers and also between users and developers.
Similarly, a product roadmap is a product’s evolution plan with prioritized features. It could be sticky notes, a diagram, or a spreadsheet. UX designer shares the product strategy with the team that needs to be applied to achieve its vision.
Tip: Limit the number of decision points to make it clutter-free/ less complicated. Make sure the scope of the user flow diagram covers a single goal or a single task of your user.
Static Wireframes
Showing your client a visual before you get into the details of the design can save you a lot of hassle. Draw a wireframe in a notebook and take a snapshot to share with your client or use tools like Figma, Invision Studio, etc. Their main purpose is to display the arrangement of the content, expected user behavior, features, and website layout.
Wireframes can also be presented as digital illustrations that represent the organization of the website/app. They can be particularly beneficial in saving a lot of time and money because they are easy to make and adjustable to work with.
Tip: If you plan to present a wireframe to the team, try to keep Wireframes simple and include annotations that help to create context and quickly deliver key ideas.
Interactive Prototypes
With tools such as Figma, Invision, and Adobe XD, the interface design level deliverables include interaction prototypes by default. Static images just cannot convey that interaction feeling. You’ll always find many small interactions or design adjustments only after you build the interactive prototype.
An internal review of a product prototype allows everyone on the team to see how things will work, and how an actual user interacts with it. It also helps users test a product that feels 100% real, provides ideas, and gives valuable feedback.
Tip: Test prototypes on real devices as much as possible, as nothing can replace experiencing designs better on a real device.
Mood Board and Visual Design
Have you ever heard from your client wanting a site that was ‘edgy, yet safe, but also cool and blue, but not icy or depressing hospital-scrubs-blue’? A mood board is a great tool for checking that your idea of the site’s look and feel matches your client’s.
Visual design is the last step before handoff to developers and the phase where a style guide and final specs are crafted. UI style guides are generally a series of guidelines or visual references or component libraries to help designers define or set the typography, UI elements, and interactions. This ensures product consistency across different design teams, companies, and brands.
-Combined design inception worksheet
Tip: Mood Boards should be visually stunning collections of ideas, full of textures and images that transform your pitching experience at the start of a project. Whereas, a design style guide can be generated in a few seconds from Sketch, and design-handoffs can be possible easily with Zeplin.
Hopefully, you now have a good idea of what a UX designer has to deliver or communicate with stakeholders.
If you’re thinking ‘we do not have enough experience to deal with this’ or “what if I don’t have enough time”, contact us to get a free UX consultation.
About Galaxy Weblinks
We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services. Our UI/UX designers are creative problem-solvers with a decade of experience in all facets of digital and interactive design. We create compelling and human-focused experiences delivered through clean, and minimalist UI.
In 2024, web development is projected to reach a staggering $488 billion industry, with over 1.8 billion websites worldwide. These interesting statistics emphasize the significance of the web in our digital age, where every click, tap, and interaction hinges on this global platform. Yet, behind the scenes, it’s the uncelebrated heroes, the backend frameworks, that power the seamless experiences we often take for granted.
The significance of choosing the right backend framework cannot be overstated in 2024. In this article, we’ll explore the top 8 backend frameworks for 2024, providing a comprehensive overview of each framework, along with real-world examples, key metrics, and the importance of making an informed choice about the best backend framework suited for you.
The Backbone of the Web: Backend Frameworks
Backend frameworks form the backbone of the web, ensuring that applications and websites function smoothly. They provide the infrastructure for data storage, retrieval, and the logic that drives the user interface. In short, they are the invisible architects behind every online interaction.
Now, let’s explore the top 8 backend frameworks for 2024 and gain insights into their unique strengths and applications.
Node.js
Node.js continues to be a strong contender in backend development. Because of its event-driven, non-blocking architecture, it is a great option for real-time applications. In 2024, it remains a reliable option for scalable, high-performance backend systems.
Netflix utilizes Node.js to deliver seamless streaming experiences to millions of users simultaneously. With an active community and thousands of packages, Node.js remains a solid choice for backend development.
Django
Django, written in Python, is known for its simplicity and robustness.It has several built-in features and complies to the “batteries-included” principle. For startups and rapid development, Django is a wise pick. For instance, Instagram relies on Django’s capabilities to handle its massive user base and data. Django’s readability and versatility continue to attract developers worldwide.
Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails (RoR) advocates convention over configuration, which leads to faster development. RoR is perfect for startups aiming for quick prototypes and scaling in the future. Airbnb, GitHub, and Shopify owe their success to RoR’s efficiency and developer-friendly syntax. RoR powers some of the world’s most popular platforms, reflecting its reliability.
Express.js
Express.js pairs beautifully with Node.js to create a minimalistic and flexible backend. It is well-regarded for its speed and adaptability, making it a favorite for microservices architecture.
It is considered ideal for creating APIs and single-page applications, contributing to a smoother development process. My Fitness Pal uses Express.js to deliver a seamless fitness tracking experience to its users.
Spring Boot
Spring Boot simplifies Java backend development. With built-in features like security and database access, it streamlines the development process. Ticketmaster relies on Spring Boot to handle high traffic and ticket sales during events. Spring Boot’s track record with major enterprises attests to its high-performance capabilities.
Flask
Flask, another Python-based framework, emphasizes simplicity and minimalism. For smaller projects and startups, Flask’s lightweight nature provides a nimble development experience. For instance, Pinterest utilizes Flask for its recommendation algorithms and content discovery. Flask’s growing popularity within the Python community reflects its appeal.
ASP.NET Core
Microsoft’s ASP.NET Core is a robust and versatile framework for building cross-platform web applications. With a focus on performance and security, it’s a reliable choice for enterprise-level projects. Microsoft’s own products, like Azure DevOps, rely on ASP.NET Core’s capabilities. The trust of major companies and its cross-platform compatibility highlight ASP.NET Core’s reliability.
Laravel
Laravel, based on PHP, is celebrated for its elegant syntax and developer-friendly features. It works great for creating cutting-edge APIs and web apps. 9GAG’s backend is powered by Laravel, ensuring a seamless user experience. Laravel’s rich ecosystem and successful projects showcase its appeal.
Factors to Consider Before Choosing the Right Backend Framework
Selecting the right backend framework is pivotal for your project’s success. It’s a decision that can significantly impact your project’s efficiency, scalability, and long-term viability. Pay close attention to the following elements in order to make an informed decision:
1. Project Requirements:
Real-time vs. Batch Processing: Determine whether your project requires real-time data processing or if batch processing is sufficient. Real-time applications, such as chat platforms or live tracking systems, demand frameworks optimized for low-latency performance.
API-Driven or Full-Stack: Decide whether your project is primarily focused on providing APIs for other applications or if it’s a full-stack application. Some frameworks excel in API development, while others are better suited for building complete web applications.
Scale and Complexity: Evaluate your project’s size and level of complexity. Large-scale platforms, such as e-commerce websites or social networks, have distinct requirements compared to smaller applications. Ensure your chosen framework can handle the anticipated workload and complexity.
2. Team Expertise:
Programming Languages: Evaluate your team’s expertise in programming languages. If your developers are proficient in a particular language, it may be wise to choose a backend framework that aligns with their strengths. This familiarity can significantly accelerate development.
Framework Familiarity: Consider your team’s experience with specific backend frameworks. Using a framework they are comfortable with can lead to faster development cycles and fewer errors.
3. Scalability:
Future Growth: Plan for the future. Your chosen backend framework should be capable of scaling alongside your application’s growth. It should accommodate increased traffic, data volume, and feature enhancements without major overhauls.
Scalability Patterns: Understand the scalability patterns that your framework supports. Horizontal scaling, vertical scaling, or a combination of both may be required depending on your project’s needs.
4. Community and Support:
Community Activity: A vibrant and active community around a backend framework is a valuable asset. It indicates ongoing development, timely bug fixes, and a rich ecosystem of plugins and extensions.
Support Channels: Investigate the availability of support channels. Are there official forums, documentation, or community-driven resources that can assist your team in troubleshooting issues or learning the framework?
5. Performance:
Load Testing: Conduct load testing to assess the framework’s performance under conditions that mimic your project’s expected load. This helps identify potential bottlenecks and performance limitations.
Benchmarking: Compare the performance of different backend frameworks using benchmarking tools. Real-world performance metrics are crucial for making an informed decision.
6. Security:
Built-in Security Features: Examine the framework’s built-in security features. Robust authentication, authorization, and protection against common security vulnerabilities (e.g., SQL injection, cross-site scripting) are essential.
Security Patching: Consider how quickly security patches are released and implemented within the framework’s community. Timely security updates are vital to protect your data and users.
Benefits of Using Backend Frameworks
Backend frameworks offer several advantages like:
Efficiency: Frameworks provide pre-built components, reducing development time.
Security: Many frameworks include built-in security features.
Scalability: Frameworks often offer scalability options to accommodate growth.
Community: Access to a community of developers for problem-solving and updates.
The Future of Backend Development
As we step into 2024, the future of backend development looks promising. The relentless march of technology continues to redefine how we approach backend development, with several noteworthy trends shaping the landscape:
1. Serverless Computing:
In 2024, serverless computing stands at the forefront of backend evolution. This shift allows developers to focus on code, leaving infrastructure management to cloud providers. Scalability, cost-efficiency, and reduced operational overhead are driving the adoption of serverless architectures.
2. Containerization:
Containerization, epitomized by technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, remains a pivotal force. Containers offer portability, consistency, and efficient resource utilization. They simplify deployment and orchestration, making it easier to manage complex backend systems.
3. Microservices:
The microservices architecture continues to gain momentum. Breaking applications into smaller, independently deployable services promotes agility and flexibility. This approach enables rapid development, easier maintenance, and the ability to scale individual components as needed.
4. Edge Computing:
With the proliferation of IoT devices and the need for low-latency processing, edge computing emerges as a game-changer. Backend development is extending to the edge, allowing data processing closer to the data source. This revolutionizes real-time applications and reduces latency.
5. AI and Machine Learning Integration:
AI and machine learning are becoming integral to backend development. These technologies empower applications with predictive capabilities, data analysis, and automation, enhancing user experiences and decision-making.
6. Enhanced Security Measures:
As cyber threats grow in sophistication, backend development focuses on bolstering security. Advanced encryption, threat detection, and authentication mechanisms are integrated into frameworks to safeguard data and user privacy.
Future Of Backend Development
The future of backend development promises increased efficiency, scalability, and responsiveness. It’s a landscape where technology not only meets the demands of modern web applications but also anticipates and shapes them. Backend frameworks are evolving to embrace these trends, offering developers the tools they need to create cutting-edge, high-performance applications.”
In this dynamic environment, staying informed and adaptable is paramount for developers, ensuring they harness the full potential of these advancements to create robust and innovative backend solutions.
Your choice of backend framework lays the foundation for your project’s success. Node.js, Django, Ruby on Rails, Express.js, Spring Boot, Flask, ASP.NET Core, and Laravel all offer unique strengths for 2024. Assess your project’s needs, your team’s expertise, and your scalability requirements to make an informed choice.
At Galaxy Weblinks, we understand the evolving landscape of backend development. Our web development and backend services are tailored to meet the needs of modern businesses. Get in touch with us right now to find out how we can support your digital journey.
In the dynamic world of web development, making informed decisions is the key to unlocking the future of your digital ventures in 2024 and beyond.
This article is an assessment and comparison of the popular content management systems WordPress, Drupal, and Craft. We’ll dig into each CMS platform’s features, ease of use, the types of businesses that are best suited to the platform, and more. We’ll also walk you through the use case scenario of each CMS and will help you understand which one could be right for your business and goals.
Before we explore the nuances of each CMS, let us quickly introduce the three stalwarts in the CMS arena.
WordPress
WordPress is an extremely versatile CMS that facilitates users (even non-developers) to create feature-rich websites and ecommerce portals. It is completely customizable, mobile-optimized, and SEO friendly. It’s also open-source, making it completely free, redistributable, and offers unlimited validity.
The most popular CMS platform powers more than 40% of the websites available on the internet. It also offers thousands of free and paid themes and plugins that the developers can choose from.
Drupal
Drupal’s open-source model encourages continuous improvement and innovation through the support and passion of the Drupal community. With a pool of diverse experts regularly working to make Drupal better, the possibility to create exceptional digital experiences expands far beyond what a single team of proprietary software developers could dream up.
Recent versions of Drupal have also prioritized user experience (UX) to empower everyone from the site editors to content creators and to build powerful customer experiences.
Craft
Craft CMS is a content management system similar to WordPress. The interface is a simple, more stripped back version of WordPress, built and tailored to the needs and requirements of the business. This simple view makes updating and adding content a much more seamless experience.
For some, this adds an increased level of comfort when migrating over to Craft due to the out-of-box understanding developers, designers, and writers are likely to have.
Comparison — WordPress, Drupal, & Craft CMS
Below are the brief use cases for each CMS, showcasing when and how the three of them are being used to help you decide which one suits your business needs, size, and scalability.
WordPress
One of the common misconceptions about WordPress is that it’s mainly for creating blogging sites. WordPress was developed as a blogging platform, but that is ancient history now. The platform has evolved radically with the various new releases over the years.
The good news with WordPress is that it is extremely flexible. It can be adapted for ecommerce websites, corporate websites, communities, and forums. WordPress is an ideal fit for startups as well, as it allows them to start small and then scale up to run even enterprise level organizations that span many countries and continents.
All you need are suitable plugins and themes. So, for instance, if you wanted to make an online portfolio for your web design business or even a blogging site, you could go with the provided themes. You can alter its source code to customize your website’s look or functionality!
You have a choice of adding extra oomph to your website by opting for customizations.
For example,
You may have a website that includes a design that should be converted to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — being three different “technologies”, and be mobile friendly as well. That design is then integrated into a WordPress theme. Whereas all dynamic components such as menus, sidebars, footer widgets, and general content areas should be connected and coordinated with the backend.
Several custom features are then built as custom plugins by a back-end developer, who should be aware of the front-end specifics and business needs through a manager. That final product is packaged and then hosted on a specific server environment.
It will require an extra pair of hands further when it comes to security (having more people able to tackle an assignment and a project manager in charge), having potentially higher code quality when a bunch of people carry out code reviews. This process includes automated testing and ongoing scalability given the diverse expertise of our WordPress developers.
In addition to that, WordPress might be free but it is common for businesses to pay the experts to design a logo for you or adjust some of the CSS code on your site. Whereas, other WordPress users are keen on keeping graphic designers or maintenance experts on call.
So, it all depends on your experience and the scale of your website.
Drupal
Drupal is the best choice if you are building a website that needs complex data organization, that needs to be customizable.
For instance, when you’re building an advanced website, you can choose from among many technologies. Usually, the first choice is the programming language (ASP.NET, Java, Python, PHP, etc.) and then we decide whether we should code everything from scratch or use a framework to do all the heavy lifting.
There is also a third choice, a more comprehensive solution, CMF (content management framework). Drupal 9 is one of these frameworks/systems.
And by large and advanced, we mean one that is changed frequently. Content changes are carried out by at least one editor, supported by at least one developer (along with a QA tester and a sysadmin), who’s responsible for fixing the bugs, continuous development of the website, adding new functionalities, and so on.
Some examples of large and advanced websites are:
A corporate website of a medium or large production or service company.
An informational website, for example, run by a paper or magazine.
An organization’s employee portal for managing processes in the company, such as a CRM system.
A system feeding content to other systems — an API with content for other websites and mobile applications.
Besides, Drupal has almost everything you need out-of-the-box. But more often than that, you may need a functionality that is not a part of the Drupal core yet. And to fulfill that need, you need modules. Modules are bundles of code that can extend or add the functionality of Drupal websites. For example, Drupal Commerce provides everything required to sell products, services, or files online.
Craft
With Netflix, Moz, Duck Brand Duck Tape, Salesforce, PBS, and countless other brands running Craft websites, it’s a mature and competent content management system. At the same time, one of the most important things about Craft is that it is among the newest CMS solutions.
Craft CMS has ditched the traditional CMS systems that come with pre-built themes, CSS frameworks, and ready-to-go websites. It provides a bespoke solution to developers. Craft CMS neither offers posts or pages nor does it offer any bootstrap features and themes to spin up the frontend.
Everything is coded and designed from scratch which allows creating a unique experience specific to your project. And a fluent, sensible content management experience is the result.
Craft specifically targets developers responsible for building complex websites for companies with large budgets.
The primary reason for what makes Craft successful is that CraftCMS gives web professionals and developers control over websites they build.
There are many key tools in CraftCMS that are managed through the control panel of the CMS that illustrates how Craft supports and favors developers of your business:
Hundreds of Craft mediated plug-ins
Live preview during the website build
Regular releases and bug fixes
Complete control over the content and categories
An ability to manage multiple sites with one Craft installation
Custom templates
Allowing developers to write and use their own HTML
Why does it matter to your business?
When we boil this down to value for your business, all three CMS ensure a robust and feature-rich website with fewer maintenance costs, faster publishing, and quicker onboarding of new people.
The flexibility and features they offer are out of the box, along with their content-first approach, and make them our go-to for nearly every custom web project.
It’s a crucial part of our web design and development capabilities. Intrigued? Get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to talk about how they can make your site great.
For the past few years, Frontend developers have shown partiality towards React, with Vue.js and Angular tagging behind closely. Comparative interest in Vue has held back a bit due to the long-awaited and somewhat delayed Vue 3.0 release. Similarly, the interest in Angular has decreased due to the long delay in shipping Ivy (its frontend renderer).
The NPM Trends graph above shows us the number of downloads of each framework over the last few months.
However, regardless of who dominates the battle of most popular JavaScript frameworks, there are some next-generation reactive frameworks available. They may soon rise as the lean alternatives to these popular web app development framework ecosystems in 2021.
We’re already seeing significant interest in next-generation front-end frameworks. Svelte tries to provide reactivity on top of normal DOM structures. Also, Dojo has broken the surface as a reactive TypeScript-first framework with intelligent defaults for a faster out-of-the-box experience. Just like Svelte, Stencil is a framework that is focused on web components and efficient compilation.
Let’s take a look at the most in-demand and promising front end development frameworks for your web development projects in 2021.
React
React makes it easy for developers to create interactive user interfaces. The framework is designed with backward compatibility and component-centric applications in mind, so you can be assured about the longevity of your application.
One of its major advantages is the ability to use it for native development. Reusable components, better performance, support from Facebook, a large developer community, and SEO friendliness, are some of its added advantages.
When To Use React:
Developing small enterprise-level apps
Creating SPA or cross-platform applications
Angular
Angular is generally used to build front-end applications in both large enterprises and small-sized companies. However, its popularity has taken a dip in the past few years.
Angular increases the performance of browser-based applications by dynamically updating the contents in no time since it uses two-way data binding.
When To Choose Angular
Large scale applications
If you need a scalable architecture or prefer TypeScript
Building real-time applications
It supports many popular websites and web apps like Sony, PayPal, Upwork, and the Guardian.
Vue
One of the most popular front-end frameworks nowadays! Vue is a straightforward and simple framework. It’s good at removing the complexities that Angular developers face. It’s smaller in size and offers two major advantages – a visual DOM and a component-based approach in building user interfaces. It’s also a 2-way binding ecosystem that can handle both dynamic and simple processes with ease.
Why Choose Vue.js:
Helps design everything from scratch and is successful in developing giant projects as well
Assists in multiple tasks
Helps in building web applications, mobile apps, and progressive web applications
Vue is the framework behind Alibaba, 9gag, Reuters, Xiaomi.
Ember.js
Ember.js is an open-source JavaScript framework. It is used to create scalable, enterprise-grade, single page web applications. It provides custom properties, useful binding, and ready configuration to render the page as needed. Even though Ember is one of the older front-end frameworks compared to Svelte, Vue, and React, it still has a big user base and packs a punch.
Reason to use Emberjs:
Well-organized
Fastest framework
Two-way data binding
Companies like Microsoft, LinkedIn, Netflix, Twitch, etc. are among its clients
Svelte.js
Svelte.js is an open-source, component-based frontend JavaScript framework written in Typescript. It is touted as a game-changing and revolutionary idea.
Svelte, unlike React or Vue, has no virtual DOM and does not require high browser processing. Instead, you build components boilerplate-free in simple JavaScript, CSS, and HTML code.
Reasons to choose Svelte.js:
Lightning-fast apps with excellent performance
Zero client-side dependencies, and no need for complex state management libraries
Used by Godaddy, Razorpay, 1password, New York Times
Backbone.js
Backbone.js is an easy-adoption framework that lets you develop SPAs swiftly. It’s based on the MVC architecture. The platform also allows you to develop projects that require different types of users, where the arrays can be used to distinguish the models.
So, regardless of whether you intend to use Backbone.js for backend or frontend, this is an ideal choice as its REST API compatibility offers seamless synchronization between the two.
Reasons to choose Backbone.js are as follows:
Backbone.js is used for dynamic applications like Trello.
Helps in building client-side models, updating faster, and reuse the code.
Easy to learn
Lightweight framework
Preact.js
Preact.js follows a component-based approach with Virtual Dom, the same as React – while being completely compatible with React. It can even use React packages without compromising on leaner size, performance, and speed.
In cases where the full potential of React isn’t necessary, most developers even use React during development and switch to Preact for production.
Reasons to choose Preact.js:
Lightweight, swift, and high-performance library
Simply 3kb in size (minified and zipped) and yet gives you all the necessary functionality of React
Many major companies like Lyft, Uber, and Tencent are using Preact
Conclusion
Many companies hire a front-end development partner with extensive experience to maintain or extend your code. This carries considerable weight, especially with project managers.
To team up with front-end experts that can build modern and faster applications with hands-on experience with the above frameworks, Contact Us.
About Galaxy Weblinks:
We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services and have hands-on experience with native, hybrid, cross-platform, PWA development. Our back-end and front-end engineers also help in improving security, reliability, and features to make sure your business
First things first, yes there are no new features in this update! There are several upgrades and a few eliminations which we believe are worth discussing.
So here’s our take on the all-new React 17.
This new version comes after a long wait of nearly two years. We believe that there are a lot of improvements vis-a-vis the previous version. The focus is largely on the gradual updates to this version and the future ones.
So, let’s see what all they are!
Changes in event delegation
The React 17 update eases the nesting of applications that are built using different React versions. A lot of conflicts were seen when many versions of React are being used together. With this update, event handlers will not be attached at document levels. In its place, it will go to the root DOM container where your React tree is rendered.
Also, with React 17 going in for gradual changes, developers will have more freedom when it comes to migration of apps in one go or smaller chunks.
Native component stacks
Finding errors with javascript function; its name and location stack trace can lead to a needle in a haystack hunt while sifting through hundreds of coding lines (if not a thousand).
To pinpoint errors in React 17, there is an unorthodox approach taken by the React team. Here is what they are thinking, in their own words:
Currently, the browsers don’t provide a way to get a function’s stack frame (source file and location). So when React catches an error, it will now reconstruct its component stack by throwing (and catching) a temporary error from inside each of the components above, when it is possible.
This improvement will come in handy during the production environment.
No More Private Exports
The new update of React has withdrawn private exports. This was a much-awaited update for React Native for Web. The dependency of React Native for Web was on certain internals of the event system. This dependency was fragile and now will be addressed with this update.
No Event Pooling
Event pooling optimizations are no longer a part of React 17. It failed abysmally to enhance the performance in older browsers. Its initial purpose was to reuse the event objects between events along with setting all fields to ‘null’ between processes. However, it ended up causing more confusion for developers. Following this change, the need to use e.persist() is also eliminated.
Properties of React Components
React 17 is now compliant with ES6. There are talks of using key or codes and in case you are working with it, you are required to code property to keyboard event objects. On similar lines, capture phase events use real browser capture, there are no bubbles in onScroll events, etc.
In addition to the above-mentioned updates, two new functions are being introduced in this update, namely ‘getDerivedStateFromProps’ and ‘getSnapshotBeforeUpdate’.
All this said, React 17 is surely working towards making React more prominent within the developer community and making it easier for all to understand, deploy, and migrate to React in the future. Feel free to get in touch with us here if you need help with your React development.
About us
We, at Galaxy Weblinks, are all for new ideas and experiments. We believe that being up-to-date in this fast-paced world gives us adequate time to explore and implement new changes. Our developers are constantly striving for improvement and a better user experience. Contact us for a free consultation!
There’s a popular user experience quote: “A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.” While clever, that statement is far from the truth.
We agree that user interfaces shouldn’t be complicated. On the other hand, you can’t expect a new user to understand a new interface without any direction. That’s where user onboarding flows come into play.
This also stands true for the existing users who need directions to understand an updated interface or a new feature.
In this article, we will discuss those onboarding UIs that will help both new and existing users understand features – breaking the myth at the same time that user onboarding begins and ends with the first experience.
We’ll be discussing UI patterns like tooltips, hotspots, modals, etc. that have roots in specific types of “popup” window situations and are popularly used interchangeably in general web conversation.
Each of them offers some common purpose:
Contextual help: Offer helpful hints and support in the context of your product.
New feature Announcement: Draw attention to a new feature without interrupting a user’s workflow.
Influence User behavior: Gently nudge users to explore, learn, or take action.
When used correctly, they can be powerfully engaging. But when used the wrong way, they can feel like spammy popups that disrupt the user experience – ultimately causing users to churn.
It’s important to find the right balance between communicating with your users and just letting them do their thing. With that in mind, let’s discuss what they are.
In-context Tooltips
As opposed to a ‘first look’ experience, these tips appear as the user explores the product that can either explain the value of that feature/section or explain how to use it.
Pros: The tooltips are in-context, so it solidifies the feature-value pairing, reducing cognitive load. This can also be created with 3rd parties like Appcues or Chameleon.
Cons: Some might never get discovered.
Popup Modal Window/Lightbox
A modal popup is great for announcements and situations where an action is encouraged, but not required. As with every customer communication, the information should be valuable and timely.
While some users may be in the habit of avoiding anything that pops up, embedded UX patterns could be something users look forward to when used the right way.
It’s similar to a lightbox that is used as a generic term for any popup that darkens the website and displays a dialog containing an image or other content. Often used to display galleries or content that should temporarily take complete focus from the rest of the page.
Generally, they can be dismissed with a cross button or by clicking anywhere in the darkened part of the page.
Gmail’s simple onboarding flow offers a good example of an effective modal window that creates delight, rather than frustration.
Pros: Immediately requires a CTA, the intended action is clear and direct.
Cons: Can often be a little intrusive.
Hotspots
They work similarly to tooltips. Some apps skip product tours and welcome screens and opt to show people tooltips and hot spots instead.
The goal of this user onboarding technique is to point out to users the certain features that play a key role in the user environment, even without noticeable warnings.
Pros: Allowing customers to explore functionality at their own pace and when they need to use different parts of the app makes this an excellent onboarding strategy. Especially for users switching from a different platform for the same product.
Cons: Users might get annoyed if you are using more than 3 hotspots on a screen.
Blank Slate Tips
Think of every not-yet-populated section/view of your product as space to nudge the user to create content. Use that space to educate the user on what type of content goes there, how to add it, how long it might take, and what value it will add.
Pros: It’s a great use of negative space. It’s persistent until they replace it with content. There’s nothing more daunting than a blank piece of paper! It leverages people’s completionist tendencies.
Cons: It might not be enough on its own.
Conclusion:
It’s important to find the right balance between communicating with your users and just letting them do their thing.
Put careful consideration into the “when” and “why” of your mobile tooltip design. Remember, tooltips are annotations – they should add value to the user experience, not overpower it.
There is no “right” or “perfect” user onboarding flow. What works for one site/product/app might not work for another. What works for one user might not work for another.
For example, you might need to onboard a developer vs. an average user.
Designing a user onboarding flow that works is complicated. It involves a lot of research, testing, and optimization.
Contact our UX design experts to shorten your users’ time-to-value, get them to that ‘aha moment,’ strengthen your brand, and do it all fast!
About Galaxy Weblinks
We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services. Our UI/UX designers are creative problem-solvers with a decade of experience in all facets of digital and interactive design. We create compelling and human-focused experiences delivered through clean, and minimalist UI.
Vue 3 is here and everyone is looking forward to catching up with the upgrade ASAP.
Vue JS is the best client-side framework out there! It has improved its bundle size and performance under the hood, making this new version appealing to the developers.
What’s the catch? Some breaking changes, deprecations, and new syntax might make your migration plan slightly harder than expected. Let’s dive in and see what you should expect.
In this article, we’ll look at how you can upgrade your Vue.js 2 application into Vue 3, and what are the breaking changes you should expect in Vue 3.
How to upgrade from Vue 2 to Vue 3
Let’s assume a scenario where you have a usual Vue.js project. You would also have a main.js file where you import the Vue router and Vuex configuration and set it to the Vue instance.
Using the CLI
Now to upgrade a Vue.js 2 project to Vue.js 3 project, you can simply add an official CLI for Vue projects, the Vue-next plugin. Besides deployment and development tooling, it simplifies the upgrade to a one-line command:
This plugin upgrades and installs the new dependencies for Vue Router, Vue, and Vuex. It also modifies the code to be compatible with Vue 3 version.
So it becomes important to create a backup of your project at the very start.
Installing Dependencies
Installing the plugin upgrades the packages @vue/test-utils, eslint-plugin-vue, vue-router, vuex, and vue to the new version. Also, a new package appears among the development dependencies, named @vue/compiler-sfc.
It helps in compiling the new Vue single file components into runnable Javascript code. Now, you can use your source control panel to see and compare all the changes.
Code Comparisons
The first thing you will notice is that the way of instantiating and configuring your application has changed. It looks and works much better than before.
Same for the Vue router. If you take a look at the configuration file, a new VueRouter becomes a call to createRouter, and the global plugin setup must be left. Instead, you’ll be using some functions from this library.
The same goes for the Vuex Store. You can use the new ‘createStore’ function to create a new instance and set the store configuration.
Breaking Changes You Would See in Vue 3
The above modifications are done automatically by the Vue CLI.
All you have to do now is to start experimenting with all the below new features that Vue 3 offers for which you will need experienced developers. Let’s understand this better.
Vue Filters and Eventbus are deprecated in the new version. EventBus was there in the Vue development whenever you’re facing a situation where you need to make a shortcut to emit events from a child to parent, or vice versa. Whereas, filters were there to help you ‘format’ your value, for example: to short URL, add currency, uppercase, etc.
You will need experts in complex cases to make the required changes in your application code and refactor both of them.
You should expect a more maintainable, smaller, faster version with the new features. Most of them are additions and improvements over the existing API.
Composition API
Composition API is Vue 3’s biggest feature so far, which provides an alternate syntax for using TypeScript, reusing code across components, and writing larger components.
This is an alternative syntax and not the new way we code components in Vue 3. You might choose to use it based on the above three reasons.
Another good thing is that the existing Options API is not deprecated. Everything is for handling advanced use cases and mainly replace mixins usage that admittedly has caused a lot of problems in large scale applications.
Mounting
As we mentioned before, the first thing that you will notice is the difference in initializing your app. In Vue 2 you use Vue constructor with the $mount method and a render function like this:
In Vue 3, you will find a more elegant syntax
Fragments
In Vue 2, multi-root components were not supported. The solution was to wrap your code in a wrapper element.
In Vue 3, components can have multiple root nodes now. This removes the use of wrapper elements and enables writing a cleaner markup.
Teleport
Having part of your component mounted in a different position in DOM than the Vue component hierarchy has been seen as a difficult situation to solve.
The teleport feature helps in creating a component that includes a full-screen modal. In most cases, you’d want the modal’s logic to live within the component, but either it starts requiring a change in component composition or the positioning of the modal quickly becomes hard to solve through CSS.
You can still interact and pass props to it like being inside the component!
Conclusion
If you want your Vue.js application to become faster, smaller, more maintainable, you should upgrade to Vue 3 with an easier approach to target native.
If you want to wait for Vue.js Migration Build release for the whole upgrade process, you can still stick to using Vue.js 2, as it’s stable and it works with any third-party library or tool.
If planning for migration, we recommend that you hire experts who can assist you with a proper migration plan and ensuing and development process, especially as the supporting libraries are still getting updated.
Contact us for your new custom or single-page application Vue.JS project.
About Galaxy Weblinks
We specialize in delivering end-to-end Vue.js software development services, apart from other popular JS frameworks. Our team of skilled and dedicated Vue.JS developers provides initial consultation, migration plan, and the final Vue.JS web app development & support. We deliver powerful front-ends, real-time applications, and single-page apps (SPAs) with on-time delivery with an agile & devOps approach.
2020 is almost at a close and it would be a safe bet to say that out of all the technologies, Cloud surged the most.
Some may believe that they may have figured out the Cloud completely. However, there still are some underlying issues that need to be addressed. Let’s have a look at what needs fixing:
Cost management
Most businesses would agree that cloud providers keep changing their billing practices, adding unwarranted complexity to what is supposed to be a fairly simple thing.
When you look at all the possible configurations it’s easy to get lost in the services enlisted in the invoice by your provider.
It’s not that just providers are at fault here! Businesses often make several mistakes that can increase their expenses. Sometimes, IT professionals like developers turn on a cloud instance implied to be utilized temporarily and then forget about it later.
If you cannot make sense of your bill, what you save on the infrastructure will be lost on bandwidth and other hidden things.
Compliance
Enterprises use the cloud to store all sorts of information, personal and otherwise. With all that information and migration of this information, GDPR compliance poses a challenge. While handling complex cloud environments, there is little time for organizations to worry about the implementation of GDPR. Any breach of the compliance and the business goes under. Add to this mix the fines which can range from 2-4% of the company’s annual revenue, if found violating the law.
Many organizations turn to employ a data protection professional who can anticipate data security and privacy according to the needs of the law. These professionals are aware of the compliance needs of the organizations they are employed in, concentrating on the duties for compliance will help organizations fulfill every legal responsibility.
Cloud Security
According to a Unisys-sponsored survey, 64% of U.S. Federal Government IT leaders view identity management solutions as critical to cybersecurity.
When we talk about security, we’re just scraping the surface of the cloud concerning what we know about the cloud and how to secure it. Furthermore, the cloud providers do not give us any choices besides using their native security solution the platform comes equipped with. A recipe for a complex system we must add.
IAM or Identity Access Management means seamlessly controlling access and rights for every user on the network. Almost every enterprise has IAM best practices in place. However, they are only effective if strictly followed across the organization.
Unchecked or mismanaged exceptions and exemptions to IAM policies are some of the leading causes of compromised data. Multifactor authentication is our best bet at securing our clouds and will eventually become ubiquitous.
To Conclude
When compared with the benefits, the cloud limitations seem to get dwarfed. However, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done by both – the services providers as well as the enterprises. Organizations can steer clear of these challenges if they have verified cloud experts by their side to guide them through.
Need help with your cloud implementation?? Let us help you.
About Galaxy Weblinks
Galaxy has a proactive cloud team that works round the clock to deploy and ensure the safety of the systems across various clouds like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
