Web Application Archives - Page 12 of 18

Effective Scaling Of Applications – Tips and Tricks

Posted on September 18, 2020October 10, 2024 by galaxy-admin

Before jumping into making a plan for scaling your application, ask yourself what attracts your user now more than ever before?

No! Not the discounts or free offers.

It’s the flawless experience that draws more and more users’ attention that leads to conversion.

Rather than playing the “wait and watch” game, now is the right time to scale up your application. As the demand grows, it should be able to handle multiple requests and an increase in user traffic.

There has been a significant surge in the use of e-commerce apps, online learning software, video conferencing tools, virtual tutoring, or language apps since the outbreak of COVID-19 around the world. Many of the web and mobile offerings were not prepared for this sudden increase in user traffic and faced performance and scalability issues.

In this blog, we will explore the various ways and means to scale applications effectively.

1. Distribute Traffic with Load Balancing

Say, your application runs on one server and that can no longer sustain the current load. We recommend adding an extra server or servers to handle the required amount of throughput for your application.

To evenly distribute traffic across the servers, we use load balancers.

There are various methods that a load balancer can route traffic between the servers. One of them is round robin, which sends requests to the servers on a cyclical basis.

For example, if we have 3 servers, then it would send the first request to server 1, the second request to server 2, the third request to server 3, and so on. However, the most efficient method is when the load balancer would send the request only if the server can handle it.

This is how we increase request processing capacity by deploying more server instances on load-balanced computing resources.

But what if this load balancer dies out? Then we would not have a backup!

To overcome this issue, we can set up two or three load balancers where one would be actively routing the traffic and the others would be backup.

The load balancers can be a tangible piece of hardware, or they can simply be software in one of the servers. The cloud services are rampantly available, making it a relatively cheap and easy way to establish a load balancer.

2. Do Not Make Your Database a Bottleneck!

As you grow the number of deployed servers, you might increase the request load on your database. At some point, database accesses will start to incur more latency when it reaches saturation.

For example, having more than ten million users query from the same database is not good. The database would take time to search for a single user amid ten million users.

The solution is to increase your database’s capacity to scale further. You can try to optimize your queries, add more CPUs and/or memory. Perhaps replicate and/or shard your database.

Sharding is used to increase database efficiency by having two or more databases so that queries could be split between them. This will ensure that the queries are executed in minimum time.

One more way to reduce the load on your database is to avoid accessing it whenever possible. This is where caching comes in.

In-memory data caching can be one of the most effective strategies to improve your overall application performance and to reduce your database costs.

Caching can be applied to any type of database including relational databases such as Amazon RDS or NoSQL databases such as Amazon DynamoDB, MongoDB, and Apache Cassandra.

3. Monitor the Performance

Imagine you want to test an existing deployment to see if it can still provide fast response times if the database size grows by 10x. You first need to generate a lot of data, which ideally echoes the characteristics of your data set and relationships. You need to also generate a realistic workload.

You then need to load and deploy your data set and run load tests, probably using a load testing tool.

This is a lot of work!

The alternative is monitoring. Simple monitoring of your system involves making sure that your infrastructure is operational. If a resource is running low, such as memory or disk space, or remote calls are failing, you should be alerted so that remedial actions can be taken before things go south.

There is a myriad of solutions and cloud-based monitoring available for monitoring. They allow you to capture metrics about your system’s behavior and present these in a unified dashboard to support both the monitoring and analysis of your performance.

When you need to scale your system and tune performance, the data you capture guides your efforts and experiments.

Being data-driven in your system evolution helps ensure you invest your time modifying and improving the parts of your system that are fundamental to supporting your performance and scaling requirements.

Understand your company’s scalability needs and implement the same. What works for other companies may not work for you. Reach out to us if you want to be amazed by the results you achieve after scaling your application with expert developers and testers.

UI Best Practices – Designing buttons that score clicks!

Posted on September 15, 2020October 10, 2024 by galaxy-admin

User Experience Design is one of our core competencies. In this blog, we will share with you the best practices of designing buttons for your user interface that will attract maximum clicks. These UI button practices will help your users prioritize tasks by removing friction on-screen while sticking to the basic principles of UX elements for web/mobile applications.

Many designers take inspiration from various new UI designs and apply in their applications like this:

But what’s wrong with this elegant on-hover and click state button?

Unfortunately, it’s lacking the very first basic rule of button design – “Make it look clickable”.

UI/UX designers should pay much attention to button designs to make buttons stand out, and read numerous articles, analyze and share ways, secrets, and principles to set the color, shape, position, size, and more factors.

Use those designs that follow basic ground rules of UI design. Especially ones that can not only lead users through a website/mobile app effectively but can also entice them to click for better sales.

And as a designer, you always need new clues, ideas, or inspiration to make a unique and useful button for your web/mobile apps.

So here are 5 latest and best button practices that you cannot miss out in 2020. And hope they can inspire you somehow:

1. Eye-Catching Hover Effects

This Framer button uses a very appealing hover effect. When users move over or across the Play button, the whole button bounces out with a cool 3D Gradient design. Once users move the mouse cursor away, the hover effect will suspend completely. Such designs are eye-catching and interesting.

Video showing buttons in UI — Edoardo Mercati

What can you learn:

You can add various hover or interaction effects to optimize your button designs in your app or web design. They could be very useful to entice users to click and go to the next stage, such as playing a podcast, buying a product, filling contact information, or reading more details, etc.

You can add some changes in colors, shadows, shapes, texts, opacity, frames, and animations of a button according to your action requirements to make it more attractive for users.

2. Microinteractions for Delete Button

You can show the functions of buttons more vividly by using “button + animation ”. Once users click a button to delete, the action gets depicted by an animation showing the file getting shredded. This is a vivid and imaginative way to showcase the “delete button”. It is an effective way to engage the users while they delete multiple files.

Animation showing button in UI — Aaron Iker

What can you learn:

In your button design, you can add vivid animations to your buttons based on different scenarios, features, and labels to make your buttons outstanding and appealing. Overall, this is excellent to improve user experience.

3. Provide Feedback with the Button States

You should always let users know that the command was registered and promptly. This requirement isn’t about how the button initially looks to the user; it’s about interaction experience with the UI element. A good way to make sure nothing is lost in transition is to define the button states in your button design.

Image showing different types of UI buttons — Ryan

What can you learn:

Usually, a button isn’t a one-state object. It should change its state to let the user know that appropriate action is being taken. It becomes essential to provide visual feedback to users to indicate the current state.

4. Buttons with Shadows and Highlights

Drop-shadows make the element stand out against the background. They also highlight it as a clickable or tappable element. Objects that appear as raised give the impression that they could be pressed down. They’re also useful for improving the visibility of light-colored design elements, especially text. Even with flat buttons (almost flat, to be exact), they give subtle interactive cues.

What you can learn:

Shadows are key entities in telling your users which UI element they are looking at. Users understand that the element is interactive if a button casts a subtle shadow.

5. Floating Navigation Button

The tooltip uses a very cool floating button that attracts users’ attention and extends the functions of the web/mobile app. It is eye-catching and useful for your users and allows them to easily switch and choose other parts of the web/mobile app. And in this way, such floating buttons can be really interesting, attractive, and impressive for users.

Animation of buttons in UI — Milan Raring

What can you learn:

In your mobile or web app designs, you can create similar multifunctional navigation buttons floating in an interface to extend the functions of a mobile/website app. You can also customize a special way to expand the functions, options, or menus based on users’ interaction with these floating buttons.

Conclusion

Buttons are going nowhere! They will further evolve and get more interactive. Plan them with the utmost consideration, so that your users can enjoy the micro-interactions. Make them flashy, make them intuitive, and make them useful – and let users engage with your application.

How OpenAPI and Swagger helps in developing RESTful APIs?

Posted on August 31, 2020October 10, 2024 by galaxy-admin

We are all aware of how APIs connect different devices and applications and allow us to place an order, book a flight, or make a reservation.

Since software products are becoming more and more about a bunch of micro-services and third-party APIs mashed together, it is critical to get their structure in order. Plus, as the number of APIs continues to rise, the lack of global API standard risks slowing down innovation and limiting collaboration.

That’s where specification comes in the picture.

An API specification is a document that describes an API.

It is stored in a machine-readable form such as JSON or a YAML file and can be converted to human-readable API documentation.

What is Swagger and OpenAPI Specification?

Swagger is a tool for designing, building, documenting, and mocking APIs. It uses the OpenAPI Specification (also known as OAS) to describe requests, responses, and any other details about your RESTful APIs.

(RESTful APIs enable web applications that are built on various programming languages to communicate with each other.)

Swagger and OpenAPI specification lets developers design and develop REST APIs seamlessly and effortlessly. These specifications help in describing the structure of a REST API so that machines can read and mock them.

For instance, to access a REST service, the client needs to know the REST API of that particular service. You would also need to write the code according to that documentation.

With OpenAPI, this step is automated.

There exists a machine parse-able file that explains to computers how a REST API works. It tells code what replies to expect and what requests exist. To quote from the OpenAPI description:

“The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) defines a standard, language-agnostic interface to RESTful APIs. This can be used by documentation generation tools to display the API, code generation tools to generate servers and clients in various programming languages, testing tools, and many other use cases.”

. . .

Developing APIs with Swagger and OpenAPI

The Swagger toolset includes a mix of open source, free, and commercial tools, which can be used at different stages of the API lifecycle while using OpenAPI spec.

These tools include:

Swagger Inspector: API testing tool that generates OpenAPI definitions from an existing API and lets you validate your APIs.
SwaggerHub: API design and documentation, built for teams working with OpenAPI.
Swagger Editor: Swagger Editor lets you preview documents in real-time, and edit OpenAPI specifications in YAML inside your browser.
Swagger UI: Swagger UI is a collection of CSS, Javascript and HTML, and assets that dynamically generate beautiful documentation from an OAS-compliant API.

And others…..

For instance,

Writing your first specification?
You can use editor.swagger.io which loads petstore samples.

The left side shows OpenAPI specification and the right side shows OpenAPI documentation which is generated based on spec. Initially, developers used to create documentation from the code.

Adding a step of specification while creating an API helps in sharing it with different teams who are going to work on these APIs or use these APIs in their application. That’s when the design and documentation of APIs come in handy.

So if you have an OpenAPI implementation and an OpenAPI description file of a REST API, you can feed that description file to the OpenAPI implementation.

And this implementation now knows how to use the REST API, it can even auto generate code to use the REST API in different languages or can generate human readable documentation for you.

. . .

Why OpenAPI Spec for developers?

As shown above, many developers find it valuable to work with a specification to automatically generate and improve their documentation, as this improves consistency and saves time.

Also, it enhances the developer experience as it makes it easier to try out and explore an API. As it helps other developers to consume your API, and having a well defined/documented API will have a great impact on it. You can focus on the API consumers need beforehand.

Secondly, it enables independence between teams, e.g, QA, Backend, and Frontend engineers know how the API is supposed to do, so they are all aligned on it.

Removing these dependencies speeds up the release process because different teams can do their tasks at a much faster pace.

Conclusion:

The OpenAPI Initiative is part of the Linux Foundation, which makes it a bit more trustworthy and at least looks like it won’t go away soon.

Whereas, Swagger tools are convenient because you can manage files in the repository and send it out as specifications with one command.

Whatever your approach to building APIs, we can help you in having a trusted and consumer friendly tool to orchestrate your API lifecycle, which can be a crucial game changer in your application development.

What is Node.js and other things you should know about it?

Posted on August 11, 2020October 10, 2024 by galaxy-admin

Whether you have recently started learning Node.js or thinking about using it in your next project, this blog will help you in understanding the main reasons why it has become so popular, and the use cases of Node.js that you can implement for better opportunities.

Node.js is an open source, cross platform Javascript run-time environment for running web applications outside the client’s browser.

That fits in a basic scenario while creating a web application, like this —

The usage of Node.js is not only limited to building web applications, but also for implementing various kinds of services.

Microservices
Developing API
Backends and servers
Scripting and automation
Frontends

The ethos of Node.js is that it uses an asynchronous, event-driven, and non-blocking I/O model. This creates lightweight and efficient real-time applications that run across distributed devices – perfect for data intensive applications.

I know you didn’t come here after escaping the never-ending research loop only to get stuck again with event-driven, asynchronous, and other jargon.

Let’s get to the basics to understand how these terms are solving age old problems — and also are the main reason why Node.js is heavily used among programmers and companies today.

Here’s where Node.js shines

Single Threading

Traditional web-serving techniques use each connection (request) to spawn a new thread (the time and resources to execute a small unit of instructions). This takes up system RAM and eventually maxing-out at the amount of RAM available.

Whereas, Node.js environment is carried out by one computer processing thread that runs through a queue of events.

That’s because Node.js is single threaded that executes each event one by one in that queue. And you also don’t have to start a new thread for every new user and make them wait.

Non-blocking I/O model

Image credit: Luminousmen.com

I/O refers to input/output. It can be anything ranging from making an HTTP request to an API, to reading/writing local files.

I/O takes time and hence blocks other functions.

Node.js is non-blocking I/O, which means:

The server will keep attending requests.
The main thread will not be blocked in I/O operations.

You can initiate the requests of 2 users in parallel without waiting for the response to the request for the first user. This non-blocking I/O eliminates the need for multi-threading since the server can handle multiple requests at the same time- making the whole process fast and scalable.

Asynchronous request handling

An app database can be crashed with a huge data load.

Receiving a high amount of concurrent data can make the database congested and result in the crash of the application. Also, it becomes expensive to queue data and maintains concurrency because of the huge data load.

The asynchronous nature of Node.js helps in handling huge data load.

Asynchronous processing allows requests to be processed without blocking the thread. This helps Node.js make the most of single threading, resulting in short response time.

Due to its single-threaded, non-blocking, asynchronous nature, Node.js is a popular choice for video conferences, chats, online gaming, or any solution that requires constantly updated data.

And that’s what leads to our next section of existing use cases of Node.js.

Popular use case opportunities in Node.js

Node.js stands out for its speed, intensive data exchange, application scalability, etc. and that is why it has been used by NASA, Netflix, Paypal and other companies.

Below are the examples of when Node.js can and should be used:

1. Chats/Chatbots:

The chat application is a popular example of Node.js. It helps in creating a data-intensive (but low processing/computation), high traffic, lightweight application that runs across distributed devices.

2. Microservices:

When building and deploying microservices solutions, Node.js is the technology of choice. Companies are using two frameworks for microservice architecture. The restify is used by npm and Netflix, while the Express framework lists Uber and IBM among its users.

Whereas, Walmart’s shift to microservices architecture with Node.js resulted in saving up to 40% on hardware and 20-50% on overall operations.

3. Data streaming

Netflix chose Node.js for application scalability and intensive data exchange.

Node.js helps in processing files while they’re still being uploaded, as the data comes in through a stream and we can process it in an online fashion. This could be done for real-time video or audio encoding and proxying between different data sources.

4. Real time data

There is a need to plan out extra resources to execute all the operations without failing to meet any service-level agreements if your web app is running live 24 x 7.

Node.js is a good fit for building real-time web apps by using push technology over web sockets (a two-way communication between the clients and servers).

Some applications function within a time frame that the users recognize as current and immediate. For example, collaborative web apps (Trello, Google Docs), live chat, instant messaging, and online gaming are real-time apps that benefit from Node.js architecture.

Wrapping Up

In conclusion, if your use case does not access any blocking resources nor contain CPU intensive operations, you can exploit the benefits of Node.js and enjoy scalable and fast network applications.

If you want to enter into the real-time web or create a data intensive application with Node.js, Contact us.

5 Useful Tips For UX Designers

Posted on August 5, 2020October 10, 2024 by galaxy-admin

How often does it happen that we put in days and weeks in designing the perfect UI design thinking that it will be a user delight.

But when the first analysis comes in, the numbers paint a different and a rather disappointing picture.

Every UX Designer under the sun has gone through this situation. Sometimes an overabundance of creativity can make us overlook the default practices.

In one of our previous blogs, we talked about the layout fundamentals that will ensure an attractive UI design. Taking that thread ahead, this article would highlight the UI tips and tricks which will work in improving your overall design.

Recognition Over Recall

In Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics, he recommended recognition over recall.

For instance, it is much easier to recognize the skeuomorphic shopping cart icon when shopping online because it is easily relatable with our regular shopping experience. If we try to replace this shopping cart icon to another icon, say cards (signifying payment), it will be hard for the users to recognize and relate to it.

The recognition time is much shorter than the recall time due to the simple fact that our brains are wired to recognize the things that we see frequently as against fairly new ones.

Use industry standard visual cues, layouts, patterns when designing tooltips, icons, buttons, etc.

Give Feedback To Your Users

Just like we accept a response from the person we are in conversation with, the same goes when interacting with websites and apps.

Additionally, the absence of human interaction on the web necessitates a response for letting your user know what’s going on.

Common feedbacks can include:

A single change in color of interaction buttons
Letting your users know how much the load time is
Their progress on the tutorial and the product tour (if any)
Letting them know the exact requirements when creating new passwords
Pinpointing the error when filling out long forms

You can leverage microinteractions to keep your users engaged. Microinteractions are the cherry on top of your beautiful UI (that is if you like cherries :p).

Rotating buttons, color changes, different cursors when on links, etc are all great and subtle examples of microinteractions.

Design An Intuitive Navigation Route

This may sound a little vague so allow me to elaborate.

When we say intuitive navigation, we refer to the predefined routes and interactions that a user is likely to take. When your users pause to understand a certain function or take time to complete any task, look into the navigation route again.

Try to point out why your user left your website or app in the middle of the product tour. Were they given the option to skip the tour or they simply abandoned it in between?

Was there something that distracted your users? Perhaps they got confused because of the different elements present, etc.

We recommend that you try to anticipate where your users can get stuck and change it accordingly.

The idea behind an intuitive design is that it confers to the established patterns of the industry or from the market leaders as well.

Let Your CTA Stand Out

This should ideally be a given while designing a winning UI. However, there is a big possibility of missing out on this one when you are in the flow.

We recommend that the CTA should be the most highlighted element on the page. You can do this via color play, text labels, font, and varying size, white space, etc. There should be no other element more enticing than your CTA.

Another point to keep in mind is that the CTA copy should be short but concise. CTA, in our opinion, should not exceed 5 words (ideal limit being 3 words). Avoid multiple CTA, for this reason, read the point below.

Limiting Your User’s Cognitive Load

What do you think is easier, ordering from a 3 items menu or 30 items menu? For most of us, it would be 3. When offered with multiple options, the human brain tends to be indecisive.

Also, according to psychologist George Miller’s theory of chunking, humans’ working memory is capable of handling seven plus or minus two “chunks” of information.

When we tend to put a lot of information out there, the majority of it is bound to be forgotten by your users and even overwhelm them. Thus, why not limit it from the beginning itself?

You can always try to break down all your information into simple forms or categorize them to reduce crowding on any given page.

We know how difficult it is to design something that resonates with a wide demographic and we also know for a fact that it’s impossible to please every single one of your users. These tips will ensure maximum engagement and stickiness.

And if you want the UI/UX specialists to analyze and help revamp your UI then get in touch with us here.

Atom vs Sublime: Which Text Editor to choose in 2024?

Posted on July 27, 2020October 10, 2024 by galaxy-admin

The coding landscape is ever-evolving, with AI-powered editors like GitHub Codespaces emerging alongside powerhouses like Visual Studio Code. Yet, many developers still choose the familiar battleground: Atom vs. Sublime Text. Both offer extensive customization and loyal communities, but which reigns supreme in 2024?

Choosing the right text editor isn’t just about personal preference; it’s a strategic decision impacting your team’s efficiency, productivity, and ultimately, your bottom line. In 2023, the Stack Overflow Developer Survey revealed that 42% of developers spend over an hour each day battling their text editor’s limitations. That’s valuable time lost not crafting innovative solutions, but wrestling with clunky interfaces and missing features.

This head-to-head comparison explores the latest features, performance metrics, and community support of Atom and Sublime Text. It equips you with the insights to forge the perfect development environment for your team, empowering them to write code like modern-day software artisans.

The Text Editor Landscape in 2024

Gone are the days of generic code editors with limited functionality. Today’s developers demand versatility, efficiency, and seamless integration with their workflows. The market teems with options, each vying for attention with unique features and philosophies. Open-source powerhouses like Atom and Sublime Text remain sturdy, constantly evolving to retain their dominance. However, understanding their individual strengths and weaknesses is crucial for making an informed decision.

Why Does the Right Text Editor Matters in 2024?

Fast forward to 2024, and the stakes in selecting an optimal text editor have escalated. In an era where efficiency, code integrity, and team synergy are paramount, the choice of a text editor is a linchpin for operational success. Here’s why:

Boosting Developer Productivity:

A user-friendly text editor can significantly reduce coding time and streamline project workflows, enhancing efficiency, integrating with version control, and offering intelligent features like code completion and error detection.

Ensuring Code Quality and Consistency:

Advanced text editors enhance software quality by ensuring consistent coding standards, reducing errors, and identifying real-time errors, thereby enhancing the final product’s overall quality.

Enhancing Collaboration:

Remote work necessitates real-time collaboration and integration with version control systems, making text editors crucial for distributed teams and collaborative coding practices.

Customization and Flexibility:

In 2024, development teams need text editors with extensive customization and plugin support to meet the diverse needs of their projects, ensuring adaptability and flexibility.

Cost Efficiency:

The debate between open-source and paid text editors is based on their impact on project timelines, developer efficiency, and long-term value in terms of productivity gains and project efficiencies.

Atom Text Editor

Atom, an open-source framework developed by GitHub, is a popular choice for teams focusing on customization and community-driven enhancements. Its modern interface, customizable package manager, robust plugin ecosystem, and seamless integration with Git and GitHub make it a favorite among developers.

Sublime Text Editor

Sublime Text, known for its fast performance and stability, is a popular choice for large-scale projects. Its standout features include its lightweight design, ability to handle large files, and its ‘Goto Anything’ feature for quick file navigation.

Atom vs Sublime: A Head-to-Head Comparison

Features and Functionalities:

Both Atom and Sublime offer an impressive array of features. Syntax highlighting, code completion, and multi-cursor editing are standard features, ensuring a smooth coding experience. However, there are distinct differences:

Customization: Atom shines with its open-source architecture, boasting a vast ecosystem of over 8,000 packages for customization. This allows developers to tailor the editor to their specific needs and workflows. Sublime offers fewer built-in customizations but supports plugin development, albeit with a smaller community.
Integration: Atom integrates seamlessly with popular tools like Git and GitHub, streamlining development workflows. Sublime requires additional plugins for similar functionality.

Performance and Stability:

Benchmarks consistently rank Sublime as faster and lighter, especially when handling large files. However, Atom’s performance gap has narrowed significantly with recent optimizations. Stability is comparable, with both editors receiving regular updates and a strong community for troubleshooting.

Security and Reliability:

Both editors prioritize security through code signing and regular updates. Sublime’s closed-source nature offers built-in encryption for sensitive data, while Atom relies on community-developed plugins for similar functionality. Reliability is high for both, with active communities providing quick responses to issues.

Learning Curve and User Experience:

Sublime boasts a steeper learning curve due to its keyboard-centric interface. However, its minimalist design and intuitive shortcuts offer an efficient experience for seasoned users. Atom’s graphical interface is easier to grasp for beginners, but navigating its extensive customization options can be overwhelming.

Actionable Insights for Decision-Making:

So, which editor reigns supreme? The answer, as in most complex choices, depends on your specific needs:

For teams seeking extensive customization and open-source flexibility, Atom offers a vast plugin ecosystem and a vibrant community.
For developers prioritizing raw performance, a minimalist interface, and built-in security features, Sublime might be the better choice.

Mitigating Business Risks:

Selecting the wrong editor can have tangible consequences. A mismatch can lead to:

Reduced developer productivity: An editor that feels clunky or lacks essential features can significantly hinder coding speed and efficiency.
Project delays: Frustrated developers struggling with their tools can miss deadlines and impact project timelines.
Increased training costs: Adapting to a new editor requires training, adding to project budgets and potentially delaying onboarding new team members.

Future-Proofing Your Development Team

Beyond immediate needs, consider these factors for long-term value:

Community Support: A strong and active community ensures access to resources, plugins, and timely troubleshooting assistance.

Cross-Platform Compatibility: If your team works across different operating systems, choose an editor with seamless compatibility.

Emerging Trends: Consider features like real-time collaboration, AI-powered code completion, and cloud integration, which might become mainstream in the future.

Choosing the Right Text Editor with Galaxy Weblinks

Choosing the right text editor in 2024 is crucial for your business’s success. It’s not just about the features a text editor offers, but how well it fits into your team’s workflow and your company’s goals. At Galaxy Weblinks, we understand the significance of this decision. Our wide range of services, from custom software development to IT consulting, is designed to boost your team’s productivity and enhance the outcomes of your projects.

Partnering with Galaxy Weblinks gives you access to our deep understanding of the latest development tools and trends. This ensures that your choice of a text editor, whether Atom, Sublime, or another option, is informed and strategic. The right text editor can greatly improve your development process, making coding more efficient, reducing errors, and helping your team collaborate more effectively.

Book a consultation call and explore how we can help you make the best choice for your development needs.The success of your projects—and your business—depends on making informed decisions today, and the selection of a text editor is a critical piece of that puzzle.

Why should you consider a Single Page Application for your next project?

Posted on July 16, 2020October 10, 2024 by galaxy-admin

Single Page Applications(SPAs) are all around us. Industry leaders like Google, Trello, Facebook, Gmail, Github, vouch for it.

Their structure is considered the best for seamless user experience and resonates well with the native app-like experience on browsers. However, there are many more reasons that have made SPAs so popular in the developers’ community. Read on to find out more.

Advantages of choosing SPA

– Fast and Flexible Approach

SPAs load only the user’s requested content instead of reloading the entire page repeatedly. Other sources like DOM elements, CSS, HTML are loaded only once at the beginning of the application. Only data is exchanged between the server and the client afterward.

This improves the page loading speed and lessens the waiting time for the users. And given how user’s attention span and patience levels are decreasing day by day, this is a noteworthy feature.

– Works on Lower Network Bandwidths

SPAs can work well in lower network bandwidths. Even when your users are present in remote locations with slow internet speeds, SPA-based solutions will not hinder the overall user experience.

– Enhanced User Experience

You can give your users a simple yet aesthetic experience. This is possible because of transition effects and parallax scrolling. This makes the websites interactive and provides a simple linear website for the users for limitless scrolls, helpful for the mobile experience too.

– Caching Mechanism

Caching of all local data is very efficient in SPA. A single request is sent to the server and all the data gets stored in one ago. This stored data can then be used even when your users are offline.

– Easy Debugging

Debugging is easy in SPA, thanks to Chrome and the apps used to develop it, namely, AngularJS Batarang, React Developer tools, etc. Most of these frameworks have their debugging tools for Chrome. The life of developers is a little less bumpy in the SPA’s debugging in comparison to MPA’s debugging. You can also monitor network operations, look into every page element, and the data associated with them.

SPAs have a lot to offer. However, there are some drawbacks as well! Let us see what they are.

Where SPAs Lack

– SEO troubles

SPA structured apps are believed to be ranked lower in the search results page. They run on Javascript and the data is downloaded on the client’s request only. Thus, these single page apps don’t reload new pages with unique content and URLs making it difficult for the search bots to find and crawl it.

– Security issues

The rage about the security of data is at all times high! SPAs do have security risks associated with them. It is said that SPA is prone to cross site scripting attacks. Via this, hackers can push client side scripts into your web app.

Developers need to be alert with the information sent in the initial page load. Any slip here can lead to data leaks and information may end up in the hand of hackers.

All this said and understood, there are places where opting for MPA is said to be a better option. But in case you are wanting to see if SPA is the answer you are looking for, refer to the next section.

The Ideal Scenario for an SPA

As mentioned earlier, SPAs are not the most optimal option when it comes to SEO optimization. But if you are looking to build a social network like Facebook or Linkedin (both are based on SPA), you can opt for it.

Next in line are closed community groups and SaaS platforms, SPAs are said to be the go to choice for these two categories as well.

SPAs take the spotlight when it comes to building native app experience for browsers with less load time. If you are building a dynamic personal or company website having small data volume then also you should go for SPA.

There are many frameworks that you use to build SPAs. The preferred ones are Angular, Meteor, Ember JS, React, Vue, Backbone JS.

The end choice of course needs to align with your business needs and future perspectives. Feel free to consult with our experts here.

Next.js vs. Electron: Making the Right Choice for Your Project

Posted on July 10, 2020October 10, 2024 by galaxy-admin

The global enterprise software industry is projected to make a remarkable $302.9 billion in revenue by 2025. This fact highlights the critical importance of selecting the right technology stack to ensure your project’s success.

One such decision that holds immense relevance today is choosing between Next.js and Electron for your development needs. This choice is not only relevant to Software Engineers and Technical Project Managers but also to Startups and Tech Entrepreneurs looking to grow their projects.

Next.js: Simplifying Web Application Development

Let’s begin by looking at Next.js, a framework that has gained widespread acclaim for simplifying web application development. It’s an open-source React framework that offers server-side rendering (SSR) and static site generation (SSG) out of the box.

For those seeking a straightforward approach to building web applications, Next.js is a top choice. Its built-in support for SEO optimization ensures that your website performs well in search engine rankings, providing a solid foundation for attracting visitors.

Electron: The Desktop App Dynamo

When it comes to desktop application development, Electron takes the stage. Electron is a framework that allows you to create cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It offers efficiency and versatility, allowing developers to leverage web expertise and achieve cross-platform consistency on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Notable applications like Slack, VS Code, and Discord are powered by Electron. For instance, Slack’s Electron-powered desktop app seamlessly combines web and desktop functionalities, offering a unified and polished user experience.

Making an Informed Choice

When deciding between Next.js and Electron, there are several factors to consider:

Application Type:

Think about the nature of your project. If you’re building a web-based application meant to be accessed through browsers, Next.js is the natural choice. For standalone desktop applications, Electron is the go-to option.

Performance:

Next.js offers impressive performance for web applications. In contrast, Electron apps can be resource-intensive. Your choice should align with your application’s performance requirements.

User Experience:

Consider the user experience you want to deliver. Next.js excels in creating web experiences, while Electron empowers you to craft desktop applications with native-like interactions.

Development Team:

The expertise of your development team matters. If your team is well-versed in web development, Next.js may provide a smoother transition. Electron might require additional knowledge of desktop application development.

Take Spotify, for example, which utilizes Electron for its desktop app. Spotify delivers a familiar interface and a rich audio experience, seamlessly blending web technology with desktop functionality.

Your Project’s Path Forward

The choice between Next.js and Electron hinges on your project’s specific requirements and your development goals. As a Software Engineer or Developer, mastering JavaScript equips you to tackle both web and desktop application development, enhancing your versatility.

At Galaxy Weblinks, we understand the significance of making the right technology choices. Whether you lean towards the web-centric Next.js or the versatile Electron, we are here to assist you on your development journey. With our expertise in design, Agile methodologies, and web development services, we can help you navigate the complexities of modern software development.

If you’re ready to explore the possibilities, feel free to contact us today.Our dedication to providing excellent software solut

5 ways to optimize your ecommerce website for Voice Search

Posted on June 30, 2020October 10, 2024 by galaxy-admin

Voice search is at its peak in popularity among millions of users. According to an OC&C Strategy Consultants market research, Voice Shopping is projected grow to be a $40 billion plus segment in next two years. Numbers alone are a proof that voice assisted interactions are no longer exclusive to accessibility.

Your customers are now speaking more to Google assistant and Siri than to your website’s chatbots for their product queries.

In such a scenario, voice search will help your customers to visit your website, look for their product, and make the purchase (if only it was that easy). But you can make it easy for your visitors.

Google’s insight says a lot about the current consumer mind set about shopping and smart speaker.

According to Google, almost half of the people who own a smart speaker are willing to receive information related to deals, promotions and sales from brands

People are willing to share and receive information via these devices. Now the question is, how to optimize your ecommerce website for voice search? Scroll down to find the answer to this question.

Here are 5 actionable tips to optimize your ecommerce for voice search-

1. Prioritize Long-tail, Contextual Keywords

In voice search the keywords are not just 2-3 words, instead it’s a complete sentence. The reason being, when we ‘speak’ to our devices, we are considering it to be an actual life conversation and therefore frame the queries accordingly.

Your visitors have a high probability of saying, “Siri, where can I find toys for my 5 year old child?”. When a person types the same query, it goes something like, “Toys for 5 year old”.

Voice search revolves around the illusion of having a conversation with your search assistant or search engine. Additionally the typing effort is absent here, so a person subconsciously speaks more as compared to typing the same query. Thus, long tail and contextual keywords come into the spotlight here.

2. Decrease your website’s load time across platforms

A lot of your traffic will be from mobile devices, thus you should optimize your website’s speed for mobile. A speedy website benefits from higher engagement from visitors, they will be able to see various products offered, and thus improve the overall user experience.

Tools like PageSpeed Insights will provide you information about all your webpages, which ones are slow and possible recommendations to increase the speed as well.

Optimizing your website’s speed is even more essential as Google is now deploying the mobile first ranking system.

For improving the speed, you can start by doing these tweaks:

Compress your images but do not compromise on the image quality
Deploy caching technique
Constantly look out for broken links
Select fast web hosting platforms like A2 hosting, Hostinger

Google tends to rank those websites higher from where it can readily extract the information requested for and this is done via structured data, more on this later.

3. Target the Local SEO first

The voice queries from mobile devices have 3 times more chances of being locally based according to Search Engine Watch. And it fits well because mobile searches are done when on the move like driving and the query is done hands free.

Phrases like, near me, within x meter range, etc are popular ones. Cracking the local SEO will help in such situations. Your visitor will appreciate this as they will be directed to the right place within minimum time limits.

4. Focus on your website’s content

Your website’s content needs to be educational, easy to understand, relevant and in line with your consumers thought process. This can be done with paying adequate attention to your FAQ page, product descriptions and content for featured snippets.

Your FAQ page will answer the what, where, how, when, why type of questions which are conversational in nature. This means that when your potential customers are looking for these answers, say while driving, they will be directed to your website.

When writing your FAQ page, you will be able to think of numerous questions that your customer will have as they come across your products and services. When done right, FAQ pages will increase your visibility chances.

Your product descriptions also play a vital role here. They should follow a natural conversational tone and sound like a conversation between friends. When elaborating the features of your products, you should aim for a more friendly sounding tone instead of a salesy one.

Your FAQ page and product descriptions can also be taken for Featured snippets by Google if you are close to answering the questions that customers put in. And who does not wish to be on the top of the search results page?

The content that resonates with the way your customers converse will win at the end of the day.

5. Schema markup for your website

Using Schema markup or structured data helps Google in extracting the most important information about your products and sending the same to your customers upon related search queries.

A well structured website facilitates easy discovery of key information for Google and thus your website can be ranked a bit higher, giving an upper hand over your competitors. When necessary information is highlighted on the search page itself, people will be more inclined to pay a visit to your website.

You can visit Schema.org for getting started and to see how well your website is structured, you can test using the Structured Data Testing Tool.

There is no denying the fact that people have shifted to voice search and will be relying heavily on it in the future. Once your ecommerce website is optimized for voice search, you can leverage it to increase your sales and who knows, you can hope for reductions in your churn rate as well.

Reach out to us for our expertise in building optimized solutions for all your ecommerce woes.

6 Best practices to avoid common backend mistakes

Posted on June 29, 2020October 10, 2024 by galaxy-admin

Software development is complex and thus mistakes happen all the time. It’s something that shouldn’t bother you too much since it has happened to every backend developer.

The fact is that most times, the reason for these mistakes is pressure which leads to human error. Deadlines, feedback anxiety, skipping testing, and rushing things are the four horsemen of backend mistakes. The trick is find your way around it not to ignore it.

“One who makes no mistakes makes nothing at all.” – Giacomo Casanova

We have listed down the best practices so you don’t have to cut corners at the backend of your project.

1. Don’t push the code without getting reviewed

Pushing your code alone?

It’s always better to get your code reviewed with either a frontend developer from the same project or a backend developer from another project. As the former has domain knowledge while the latter has backend knowledge.

And if you are working with a team, then dont push code to the default branch without the code author or other backend developer reviewing it line by line. As it might create a conflict for others working on the project as they wont be able to merge their code. This leads to vulnerabilities and difficulty in maintaining the code.

Thus it becomes crucial to create a pull request which is a simple and effective way to get your code reviewed. This allows the rest of the developers to discuss changes in a branch and agree to merge them once everyone approves.

Also ensure analyzing the code by a tool like TSLint for TypeScript or ESLint for JavaScript, before pushing it to the default branch too. As these tools ensure consistent code style, and are useful when working in teams so you don’t have to disagree on topics like tabs vs spaces.

2. Avoid using too many technologies for same thing

The availability of MERN/MEAN/LAMP stack models as ready solutions for medium and large project development saves so much time. As using one language (JavaScript) for both client-side and server-side development improves teamwork, simplifies collaboration, and speeds up development.

To eliminate the risk of bugs/vulnerabilities due to a higher number of dependencies and slower installation as more dependencies have to be installed, it’s best you use the same technology and the same pattern to resolve a given problem.

If you are talking about complex projects or about the projects with special requirements for security and performance such as public sector, banks, etc., then in such cases, it becomes necessary to build an individual technology stack which makes it possible to satisfy all the set requirements.

3. Test at each level with a bug fix

Didn’t we already fix that?

It’s a question that you or your teammate often get after the product manager posts a snapshot of the bug.

The very other moment you are retracing the time you fixed that bug in the commits, but what’s the point?

You are already in the production code that is difficult to maintain as you are afraid to break anything, which increases the number of bugs. And to avoid such scenarios, writing all the tests at each level together with a new feature and regression tests together with a bug fix would help.

This ensures a higher work performance in both the long and short term, less bugs, and finally designing a better architecture.

4. Design the data model with whole team

Here is an experience that nobody wants to go through – Fixing a poorly designed data model after an application is in production.

A badly designed data model can cause invalid production data, data being difficult to analyze or maintain, and very slow data queries.

It’s not only important to understand the database itself, but also how to create the right data model to fit your application’s scalability and performance requirements. If a bad data model isn’t deployed to production yet, you can just update the data model and remove the invalid data created at lower environments. Therefore, it’s better to take some time upfront to discuss with your team, and use a proven methodology.

You can break it down into five steps:

Understand your application workflow
Model the queries required by the application
Design the tables
Determine primary keys
Use the right data types effectively

And If a bad data model is already deployed to production, besides updating the data model, try writing a migration to fix the invalid data.

5. Monitor each production microservices

When a microservice is down, it’s likely some backend development work that needs fixing. As backend developers have to implement a status endpoint for each microservice.

Without monitoring all the microservices you might risk major bugs due to the most microservice being down.

Whereas, when you’re gradually breaking down a monolithic app to microservices or building a new system from scratch, you now have more services to monitor. Each of these will likely:

Use different technologies and/or languages
Live on a different machine and/or container
Have its own version control

With this, the system becomes highly fragmented and a stronger need arises for centralized monitoring as well. You’ll need to add trace information to each service, and need a tool that can monitor multiple services side by side. So you can understand how they interact with each other, and prevent bugs by figuring out which microservice is down, beforehand.

6. Avoid over-engineering and over-optimization

Over-engineering is like overthinking.

You’re trying to find solutions to problems that either are too early to tackle or don’t exist yet. In the end, you are left with very long functions/methods, poor commit message naming, and too much logic.

This also often means ugly code, quick hacks, abandoning programming principles like DRY, SOLID and TDD, and little to no abstraction.

It all boils down to two common reasons:

The What-if mentality
The Just-in-Case mentality

And unless absolutely imperative, this will create needless complexity, costing you significantly more than the final value delivered.

Well, it goes back to the You Ain’t Gonna Need It, syndrome. You need to constantly ask yourself if the way you’re currently writing code solves the immediate problem or program requirement OR if you’re writing it in a way to future proof it and make it more resilient to change.

Getting the right balance so that code is easy to understand AND easy to change, can be extremely challenging. It takes a lot of fine-tuning and experimentation. Implementing these best practices have always helped keep common mistakes at bay, might just do the same for you too.

For Backend related development or assistance, drop us a line.