Category: Web Application

9 UX trends that are here to stay in 2021

Posted on by galaxy-admin

New trends are emerging in every industry vertical, UX included. To keep business thriving, you have to be quick to recognize, analyze and implement trends on priority. Furthermore, any enhancement in the visual aspects of your product would lead to a higher recall from the users. 

Our experts can not stop themselves from trying new trends. We have listed the ones that will make ripples in 2021.

3D Elements 

There has been a huge surge in three-dimensional designs across the web and mobile interfaces. This not only gives an edge to your flat design but also helps draw users’ attention to the primary features and aspects of your website and app. 

These elements hold user’s attention for a longer period and encourage them to interact with your product. However, all these 3D animations and illustrations need to be optimized so that they don’t increase the page/app’s loading time.  

Engaging Motion Effects 

Animated user stories, parallax scrolling, micro-interactions, etc all are liked by users across demographics. Motions bring life to your design elements like illustrations, animations, etc.

Parallax scrolling is another emerging effect to entice users for further engagement. When users notice the difference in scrolling your webpage, out of curiosity, they will spend a few seconds more. The right mix of effects will make transitions much more delightful for all your users. However, overdoing the same will push back users, thus a few effects on the most vital features and pages should suffice. 

Neumorphism

The mix of flat design and skeuomorphism is Neumorphism. It uses shadows and highlights to give an almost 3D look to the design elements. It layers the elements in a subtle and minimalist way. Designers use similar color pallets, standard shapes, and icons, etc here. This ensures that users don’t get any sudden or unwelcome surprises.  

Asymmetry Arrangements 

The classic layouts have lost their charm among users. Any generic design presented to the users is getting lost in the virtual crowded space. Hence asymmetry and creative approaches are taking the center stage. You will need to brainstorm a lot before you come up with the ‘perfectly asymmetric yet balanced’ structure. Brainstorming is necessary so that you are not compromising on the usability and accessibility aspects of your product at any point. 

Dark Mode 

Dark mode has been implemented successfully by many organizations, but many are yet to follow. Therefore, dark mode makes this list. The benefits of dark mode are now well recognized by users too. It helps in decreasing screen fatigue (something this pandemic brought to light), saves user’s devices batteries, and is worth exploring for your product offering.  

Designers can highlight elements more easily here and use high contrast elements for focusing on the primary functionalities. A win-win situation for all!

Improved Onboarding 

A swift onboarding process will hook users for a longer duration. We saw complex remote collaboration tools and video conferencing options being disliked by users because they were complicated to use and the onboarding process shown was not very helpful. 

A smooth onboarding process with a mix of subtle hints, micro-interactions, and the option to returning to certain learning aspects play a part in creating a lasting impression on users. Storytelling is also being implemented so that a connection with a certain character/avatar can be made by users. 

Color Palettes For Playful Backgrounds 

When the talk is all about standing out from the crowd, bright, neon colors do this for you easily. Designers are willing to play with bold colors like never before. Unconventional color mix, using popping colors on your website, or just highlight the main features are the craze now. 

All this is done so that users are seeing a different and experimental side of your organization. Mixing darker shades with bold colors, following a bold theme throughout your website and app is a great way to stay in your user’s mind. But again ensure that the colors don’t distract users from the primary features and are not bringing on any accessibility issues. 

Typography  

In line with playful color backgrounds, typography is also something that UI/UX designers are testing out lately. Font style, bold text, creative text display are all being played with. And add small animations to your text here and there, users will keep interacting with your app and website. 

Bold text, especially on the hero page screams attention like nothing else (in a good way of course). On one hand, web typography is getting bigger and bold, the apps are leveraging ALL CAPS and creative fonts to fit in varying screen sizes.

Uniqueness Trumps Perfection 

What differentiates you from your competitors? What unique design will create a long-lasting impression on your users? Designers are no longer going after being ‘perfect’ in their design across platforms. In 2021, you will see more creative experiments with design layouts, elements, animations to have a higher recall value. 

Color play, different typography, playing with layouts, and all that we have covered in this blog will all contribute to delivering a unique user experience. These trends have gained a lot of popularity within the designers’ community and will continue to do so until users express some other preferences. 
To know more about our UX services, contact us here. 

Google: Core Web Vitals For Search Engine Rankings

Posted on by galaxy-admin

The new and improved page experience ranking for Google search is set to roll out in May 2021. This blog covers what the buzz is about. 

Google has introduced a new set of parameters – the ‘Core Web Vitals’ that will measure users’ experience ‘with speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of a webpage.

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This considers the loading time of the largest graphic element on the screen, i.e. Largest Contentful Paint. Such content can also be the main content of the website, so once the vital information is loaded, smaller elements follow. The ideal  LCP is set at 2.5 seconds 
  • First Input Delay: is the time taken by the page to become interactive, i.e. the response time of the page after the user initiates an action. The ideal FID is said to be less than 100ms. 
  • Cumulative Layout Shift: measures the visual stability of the website. It focuses on the time taken for all the elements of the website to become stable. The ideal CFS is less than 100ms. 

The Core Web Vitals will now be an intrinsic part of measuring the page performance, along with these factors-

  • Mobile responsiveness 
  • Safe browsing 
  • HTTPS security 
  • Intrusive interstitial guidelines

New labels for search results 

Google is contemplating adding labels in the search results, highlighting the pages that offer a better user experience. The current focus is on visual indicators that identify pages that met the predefined page experience criteria. 

However, this is still under the testing phase and the final call will be taken by Google in May 2021 based on the success of the tests. Google is staunchly recommending AMP to optimize the page experience signal.

Top stories courses for non-AMP content 

There was another announcement as well which said that non-AMP will soon be eligible for appearance in the Top Stories. 

The pages fulfilling the Google News content policies will have greater chances for Top stories carousel and greater user experience will be given priority in ranking.  

Our Recommendation

These updates will have an impact on your website’s traffic, therefore, we advise you to begin with the due diligence. You can check your Core Web Vitals stats here:

And in case you wish to talk more about the updates or need experts to handle the optimizations for your website, feel free to contact us here.

Why are external code audits important?

Posted on by galaxy-admin

It’s a common industry practice for applications to utilize and reuse codes written by other programmers. Although it’s an efficient way of building applications, you might not be fully aware of the vulnerabilities in the code, since it’s not yours, to begin with. That’s where External Code Audits come into the picture. It takes that unknown out of the equation. 

Apart from spotting errors and improving your code external audits will also help you understand the underlying composition, licensing, and obligations. In this blog, we’ll uncover why it’s important to conduct external code audits.We have also covered Code Review best practices in our earlier blog. Read it here.

Improved programming quality

Source code reviews are as important as QA. It not only ensures the highest code quality but also makes it easier for developers to improve overall software performance and add new features for expansion. Improved quality of code and optimized performance means, no need to allocate critical time and resources to solve technical issues and errors.   

External code audits may also help surface any code debt which came as a result of using code created by other developers. 

It saves you money

The time taken for bug detection is related to the fixing costs. Therefore, the longer it takes to detect the bugs, the costlier it gets. You can significantly reduce the cost of development by simply detecting bugs as early as possible. External code audits bring in extra hands to multiply audit efforts and cut the time by a significant margin, providing a direct cost advantage. 

External developers can easily detect mistakes made by other developers, as it’s fresh for them and they have no other obligation other than shipping the best possible version of that code.

Streamlines development

When an engineer (not just developers) does one thing a million times, it gets harder to see subtle mistakes and efficient alternatives. That’s why QA engineers, editors, and supervisors are there. External code audits can help surface inefficiencies in the code and mistakes that go undetected. If given a pass, these mistakes can cause critical development issues and undermine the project management. 

Helps upskill new coders

If you have new and less experienced developers in your team, external code audits can be eye-opening. It can help them improve their skill and learn about different modules, workarounds, and coding practices. Through this practice, the newcomers can come out as experienced coders after learning from their mistakes pointed out during the reviews. 

Improves Project estimation accuracy

Reviewers performing code audits are people who are very familiar with the codebase you’re dealing with. There is a great chance that they already know the underlying common issues with the codebase and can recommend solutions based on the complexity of your project.  Knowing about the issues and possible workarounds beforehand will give you an edge and help you make more precise project estimates, in terms of cost, time, and resources.

Consistent code across the software

When you’re working on complex projects, consistency becomes a challenge. Code audits help maintain consistency in your code throughout the software development project. External developers will keep a watchful eye on the coding style and any other element that needs to be consistent for better understanding and easier transitions in the future. 

Conclusion

Software development, like any other process, is collaborative and when things exchange hands, it creates room for flaws. External code audits eliminate those possibilities while optimizing and speeding up development in the process.

About Galaxy Weblinks

We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services and have hands-on experience with large, medium, and startup business development requirements. Our engineers also help in improving security, reliability, and features to make sure your business application scale and remains secure.

Code Review | Foolproof Your Software Quality

Posted on by galaxy-admin

Code reviews can be tedious and if the code is somebody else’s then some frustration is justified. However, code reviews do save a lot of time and keep breaking errors in check.

Based on the scale of your project you can either go with peer review or with group review. When you’re confident about your code and are in a time crunch, you can choose to get your colleague to review your code. This way, you get an error-free code that can be pushed for production. On the other hand, if the project scale and team size are larger, you can opt for a group review. Let’s explore both these options –

What is a Peer Code Review?

Simply put, when you ask one of your teammates to see if there are any mistakes or areas of improvement in your code.

The Process

Typically, when the code is complete and ready for review, the developer creates a request to get it reviewed and forward it for release once approved. The assigned reviewers then approve or reject the pull request depending on the quality of the code. If approved, it implies that the code is ready to be merged in the release branch. Just to an additional layer of assurance

To ensure the highest code quality and keep a check on code churn, practice heads like development lead and engineering head are also added default reviewers. They are notified via emails about the requests along with developers that are doing the review. These reviews are dynamic and are done as and when the pull requests are created.

What to Look for During the Review

Even though there are multiple sets of eyes involved, there’s a lot that can still go wrong with peer reviews, if not taken seriously. Blanket approvals will only set you back further. Different teammates might have different standards of code quality, in that case, a checklist can help people align.

Peer-review Checklist 

peer-review-code

This checklist can help the reviewers prioritize what matters and find out defects before the code goes for production.

What is a Team Code Review?

It’s like peer review but more people are brought in for this and review the code as a group. The motive here is to bring different sets of people with different expertise onboard to test the overall feasibility of the code. Think Developers, Testers, Architects, and Managers gathering weekly for code review.

The Process

Since a lot many people are involved in a group review, it calls for a slightly different approach than the one used in peer review.

  • The developer presents the user story to the entire team.
  • Review of the design as per the user story implementation.
  • Then the code is discussed and reviewed by the review group.
  • Test cases are compared with the business rules implemented in a user story.
  • Code walkthrough is done to get the logic across to every individual, sanitizing the code in the process
  • SQE group presents the test cases based on the user story.
  • Database dependencies like table schema, initial data scripts, data upgrade scripts are then reviewed by the DB team.
  • The Release Engineering team is then brought in to discuss and review the dependencies on the deployment scripts.
  • The performance team then gets inputs and benchmarks performance for the user story.

Who looks for what during these reviews?

Developers will use other stories as a basis and compare from a coding perspective to see if there are any dependencies.

Testers will look for business rules that are part of the test cases and try to circle out the ones that are not if implemented.

The architect ensures that everything is as planned and according to the initial blueprint. And if all the design principles and best practices are employed to ensure software quality.

Teams like Database, Release Engineering, and Performance Engineering will look for dependencies in their area of expertise.

Why Team Code Review

  • It helps break the practice and mentality of working in silos which prevents interaction across teams.
  • It’s easier to spot errors with multiple eyes on your code
  • Testers help identify functional gaps before it’s too late
  • The architect will keep shortcuts in check
  • The shared services team will get inputs for executing the corresponding steps in their area of expertise.

Code reviews can seem like a marginal change to your process but the results are quite significant. One of the most overseen benefits of these group code reviews is to bring teams together. And when they are working as a whole instead of domain-made silos, great products emerge. It also serves as a learning opportunity for a lot of people. People who come from different domains and junior resources are just starting.

And of course, this bi-directional learning process will help keep your code symmetrical across systems while keeping it maintainable, scalable, readable, and of the best quality.

About Galaxy Weblinks

We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services and have hands-on experience with large, medium, and startup business development requirements. Our engineers also help in improving security, reliability, and features to make sure your business application scale and remains secure.

7 Best Practices For React Security

Posted on by galaxy-admin

React is undoubtedly one of the most popular JS libraries to build applications. It is also one of the most actively developed libraries which means instant bug fixes and security patches. React has many advantages, but may fall susceptible to security threats. Here are a few recommendations that we share based on our vast experience of working with this technology.

(Know more about our proficiency in Front-end Technologies)

Cross-site scripts and URL injections are some of the most common and serious attacks that affect applications in general. These vulnerabilities are targeted to steal sensitive user data and capture user input to steal credentials and card information.

We have made a list of some best practices that will help you enhance the security of React applications. Do have a look!

Protection against XSS

Your application may have some vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit and insert data in your code that your app treats as part of the code. This in turn gives the attacker the access to make requests to the server and even captures user inputs to steal sensitive credentials.

The injection might look like this:

Code!<script>alert(“malicious code”)</script>

Here’s what the same thing looks like with some protection against XSS:

Code!&lt;script&gt;alert(“malicious code”)&lt;/script&gt;

&lt; and &lt; being interpreted as < and >, the browser won’t confuse the data for code.

You can also use:

  • Using the createElement() API.
  • Using JSX auto escape feature.
  • Using dangerouslySetInnerHTML to set HTML directly from React instead of using the error-prone innerHTML.

Adding End-to-End Encryption

Almost every real-time communication application that you’re using comes with End-to-End encryption as standard.

End-to-end encryption means that nobody else other than the parties involved can read the messages. It’s made possible by encryption technology that ensures that the message is encrypted just as it leaves the sender and can only be read once it reaches the intended receiver.

To get E2E in your React application you have to rely on a vendor that provides the tools and kits to ensure secure encryption. Virgil for example is a vendor that provides a platform and JavaScript SDK to create, store, and offer robust E2E secure encryption via public/private key technology.

HTTP Authentication

There are several ways to make authentication secure in your application. Pay special attention to the client-side authentication and authorization because typically they’re ones subject to security flaws.

You can use one of these to ensure your application safety

JSON Web Token (JWT)

  • Move your tokens from localstorage to an HTTP cookie since it’s fairly easy to extract from local storage.
  • Keep, sign, and verify the secret keys in the backend
  • Avoid decoding the token on the client-side and ensure that the payload is small.
  • HTTPS over HTTP under any circumstances

Other methods:

  • OAuth
  • AuthO
  • React Router
  • PassportJs

Rendering HTML

You should always sanitize dynamic values that you assign to dangerouslySetInnerHTML. The recommended sanitizer to use is DOMPurify.

Import purify from “dompurify”;

<div dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html:purify.sanitize(data) }} />

DDoS prevention

Denial of service happens when the app is not secure or it’s unsuccessful in masking the IPs of services. As a result, some services stop because they can’t interact with the server.

One way to deal with these issues is to just limit the number of requests to a given IP from a specific source.

Or you can always- 

  • Add app-level restrictions to the API.
  • Make calls on the server and NOT on the client-side.
  • Add some tests to secure the app layer.

Keep Your Dependencies Updated

There are a lot of third-party dependencies that you use that are patched regularly for security reasons. They can prove to be risky if not updated.

Update your dependencies regularly via security patches and ensure that you leave no backdoor vulnerable for attacks. Try using npm-check-updates to discover dependencies that are out of date. And update if needed to ensure that you’re covered.

Keep An Eye On Library Code

Third-party libraries. Useful? Yes. Risky? A little.

These libraries, modules, or APIs in most cases will help you fast track your development but sometimes they might take your application down with their flaws.

That shouldn’t stop you from using some great third-party offerings. Just a word of caution though, ensure that you are aware of the vulnerabilities, their scale, and workarounds.

And lastly, keep them updated and patch the old ones, just to make your application airtight.

We hope that you find these practices useful and employ some or all to keep your React applications secure and in shape. Do let us know if you’re struggling with some enterprise-wide dependable implementation, we are here to lend a hand. Get in touch with us here.

Google Analytics 4 | The Vital Updates That You Need To Know

Posted on by galaxy-admin

A lot is happening at Google, particularly on the analytics front with the new GA4 version. Apart from some practical UI choices, this Google Analytics update has made some much-needed amendments for user privacy, as well. A long-awaited successor to Universal Analytics, let us explore what this version has in store for all of us.

Web and Mobile analytics combined

GA4 will combine your web and mobile numbers for you. Your marketing team will be able to leverage this for their campaign results. And as a brand, you will be able to assess your user behavior across platforms in a single place. All this is possible because Firebase Analytics is now deployed in the backend by Google.

Increased focus on user privacy 

GA4 will not rely on tracking pixels (cookies). Instead, it will cash in on Google Signals and machine learning for the assessment of user behavior.

Changes in reporting and UI 

UI changes are visible in this update. Reporting categorization has changed, like the early Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions groupings are replaced with Engagement, Retention, and Analysis. What remains unchanged is that data visualization is on the right and report selectors are on the left.

You will also find an ‘Analysis Hub’ that will assist in creating reports with ease. The region, device used, device model, user resource, age, language preferences, etc all can be seen in a single place under user properties. These changes reflect that shortly, your users and their experience is all that matters.

Enhanced Built-in event tracking capabilities 

This upgrade is all about tracking and measuring real time conversions. It includes page scrolls, video engagement, outbound link clicks, etc. Via this, you will be able to engage with your users right from the beginning and grab their attention for a longer duration.

This reporting is a major shift and focuses on event based tracking as opposed to session based tracking in Universal Analytics. Additionally, you do not need additional code for all this or even setting up event tracking in Google Tag Manager.

AI powered predictions 

GA4 will leverage AI and machine learning for predicting trends and decoding patterns in customer centric data. Marketers can benefit from this data in various ways, like seeing the surge in demands in a particular product, potential revenue and churn rate estimates, and plan their marketing campaigns accordingly.

Greater flexibility

GA4 enabled the option to create custom reports as per their requirements. Pre-made reports are a thing of the past now. You will see only the data relevant to your business and a clean dashboard that is also easy to get a hold of.

Some more noteworthy updates 

  • There is no bar on the volume of data that you send to the GA4 property but there is a limitation on the number of unique events that you can use.
  • Free BigQuery export for all (free version included) and you can access raw data and even run SQL queries.
  • Cohort analysis will help in grouping your users with specific common characteristics, say the average time spent on your app/ website or users who signed up for your newsletter, etc.
  • The bounce rate has now been replaced with the engagement rate. And many other new engagement metrics are seen like engagement time, engaged sessions per user, etc.
  • You will find debugging in the reporting interface itself.
  • You can also find total unique users from various platforms in the reporting view present in the GA property report.

The GA4 train is all set to jump into the future. It’s best to get on board as early as possible as  Google has ensured that the updates are done in anticipation of the future user needs. If you need someone to do the migration for you or handle analytics for you in the future, do get in touch with us.

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 analytics team is proficient in building apps that are well aligned to our client’s and platform requirements. Contact us for a free consultation!

DevOps For Enhanced Business Growth

Posted on by galaxy-admin

DevOps has been around for a good number of years now. Thanks to the promise of streamlined business and growth operations, it has gained a lot of popularity as well. However, many organizations when faced with numerous implementation challenges, are unable to make a complete transition.

Everyone needs to up their game to thrive in such a highly competitive business world. DevOps will help you in fulfilling many customer expectations like:

  • Prompt bug fixes
  • Fast release of new features and functionalities
  • Responsive feedback system
  • Storage of customer data and its safekeeping

So let’s see how you can leverage DevOps to minimize implementation challenges and provide an enhanced user experience.

Continuous Iteration and Continuous Delivery

The essential rule here is to keep iterating the code numerous times for removing any errors and bugs. CI and CD help you in getting real-time feedback from your website and iterate accordingly. When your program code is entered into a repository, it will be assembled and tested (more on this below) before it goes live. This will create a streamlined CI/CD pipeline, assisting you in numerous ways.

  • Less number of bugs reach your production cycle and QA engineers
  • Iterative deployments cycles will help in releasing new features quickly
  • You are at a lesser risk of causing high disruption as the changes are done in smaller batches
  • Deployments are automated hence your time, especially in the smaller iteration done

Automated Testing

When customers see the 404 error, they may never return to your website. Automated testing can help you avoid such situations. It works on predefined conditions and removes any new bugs that may hamper your user experience. You will benefit in the following areas:

  • The system detects errors before they snowball into bigger problems and fix them with minimum human interventions
  • The right QA tools will decrease the possibility of human errors
  • Your teams can focus on building new test suites and kits

Cultural Shift

DevOps integrated with Agile methodology will result in a lot of changes within your organization. DevOps is driven by a responsible, responsive, and collaborative approach to change.

Automation in processes and tools will lead to a learning environment. Developers, designers, and testers should come together to solve issues before it hampers the user experience. There needs to be a balance among organizational, technology, and innovation goals. Developers and QA engineers can collaborate to create products that end-users demand.

Security 

Any misuse of your user’s data can cost you dearly. DevOps helps you build a secure website so that you can collect, process, and secure your customer’s sensitive data like personal information, payment modes, and banking data. All this can be ensured via:

  • Server updates to be automated
  • SSL/ TLS configurations to be done correctly
  • Code vulnerabilities especially from a security point of view to be checked regularly
  • 2-FA for an added level of security
  • Data encryption
  • Source control
  • Restriction on data access

All the points above are an integral part of DevOps. Its implementation will build a more secure environment for your customers. Given below are a few questions that we encourage our clients to think about before they go in for a complete change.

  • Is your current setup ready to handle faster updates and features?
  • How much transparency and visibility is there throughout your SDLC?
  • With no new cost, can your current infrastructure generate more revenue?
  • How receptive is your team for new changes and an everlasting optimization process?
  • Which processes are you ready to automate right away and the ones in near future?
  • In the current setup, how are you planning on increasing the stability and performance of your business?
  • How much financial liberty is available for future expansion plans?

All these questions are pretty intense but so will be the transformation that you wish to take on. Agile and DevOps go hand in hand. If you have any doubts or need to talk to a DevOps expert, contact us here and we will be happy to help you.

How To Build An Easily Maintainable Application

Posted on by galaxy-admin

Among the many operational challenges, businesses continually face the question of how much time and money they should allocate to application maintenance.

A robust and high-performing application delivers expected business functions with rare instances of manual intervention. If you can succeed in building such an application, you have with you the very coveted almost-zero maintenance app.

However, the drive toward zero-maintenance has its own set of drawbacks. By over-optimizing the applications, the software development process may become “less friendly” to the business. You may face issues such as increasing budgets for future-proofing the solutions, unwillingness to accommodate “unrealistic timelines,” denying complex changes, etc.

End-to-end optimization may be theoretically attainable, but from an ROI perspective, the cost of achieving it may not be justifiable. Zero maintenance, as an objective, may not be easy to achieve. On the other hand, as an initiative, it can be a driver for delivery improvements. In sync with the best practices to build easily maintainable applications right from the initial stage of the development lifecycle, you can expect transformational results.

In this article, we will help you understand the significance of software applications maintenance, just like the maintenance of any other business asset. We’ll also cover the best practices to build an easily maintainable web application.

Why should application maintenance be more of a thing?

Your system’s specifications will change from time to time. They are much more likely to be in constant flux: you learn new facts, business priorities change, architectural changes due to system growth, old platforms replacements, users request new features, legal or regulatory requirements change, previously unexpected use cases, etc. Complying with new regulations, altering a particular table, upgrading to a newer release, interfacing with a different OS, or porting an application to a new server – all necessitate application maintenance.

By ensuring high maintainability practices in your software development, you will be able to:

  • Fix issues or add new features without introducing new bugs.
  • Improve performance or other attributes.
  • Adapt to a changing environment efficiently.
  • On-board new developers quickly.
  • Have a minimal impact on other components because of change to one component.
  • Establish test criteria effectively and efficiently.

Best practices to build an easily maintainable application

Eliminate Dependencies To Clear Technical Debt

Technical debt piles up as we add more and more code, by nature. If the imported code gets updated by the owner, then that code needs to be updated in the programs that use it as well. So, the tech debt that you incur is all the code that you borrow, and all the code they borrowed from, and so on.

Refactoring has made life easier as we started to understand the development processes. For example, rewriting some business logic or it could be switching to different frameworks, etc. You can pick a small chunk of tech debt in every sprint so that you don’t have to suddenly stop taking new features, and clear tech debt.

Adopt Test Driven Development

We all know that the development process is not complete if you haven’t tested your code. No doubt, writing tests might seem like extra work in the beginning. However, you will notice values of test cases when you are about to commit buggy code, only to find out that one of the test cases has failed. Test cases help to make sure that the new piece of code isn’t breaking any available functionality.

But tests become part of the maintenance overhead of a project. Badly written tests are expensive to maintain. For example, ones that include hard-coded error strings, are themselves prone to failure. It is possible to write tests for low and easy maintenance under the guidance of the right TDD team, for example by the reuse of error strings, and this should be a goal during code refactoring.

Balance Modularization And Re-Usability

A modularized solution with reusable components is one of the best practices to design a maintainable solution. Adopting modularization of every single feature and highly reusable components will require expert developers, which may increase the cost. But, these aspects will be significant in the long run due to the decreased cost of flexibility to make changes and maintenance. Every developer must still consider these aspects while writing code, irrespective of the fact that most of these aspects can be handled by using a good framework.

Incorporate Automation

Automation is the crucial part of every app development because it speeds up the delivery of products, simplifies developers’ workflow, and requires the use of fewer tools. There are two ways you can do that by making code testing a shared responsibility. Quality assurance (QA) and developers share the same goal in the SDLC: delivering a quality product on time and on/under budget. To ensure cooperation and alignment towards this goal, developers should share the responsibility of quality testing or can use required automation tools for visual QA as well. Every module must include meaningful regression, functional, and unit tests.

Following the agile methodology, all members of our team (including development and QA) are responsible for testing code. The build is then thoroughly tested including unit and integration testing via a CI process, and then reaches the QA department for black-box testing. it has already been thoroughly tested. Load tests are applied to make sure that undesirable situations are caught.

Create API And Method-Level Documentation

It is far better to not rely on inline comments to explain the logic and write self-documenting code. Although, this does not mean you should adopt zero documentation. This is especially needed when working with multiple teams or when developing an extensible application or consumable library. Because zero documentation leads to poor code readability and hard maintenance for other team members. For example, the public API should be documented precisely, describing the functionality, outputs, and inputs. This enables API users to understand and use the available functionality.

Conclusion

The zero-maintenance journey can be effective only if adopted holistically:

  • From the initiation stage, always involve key stakeholders cutting across multiple IT layers, to derive synergic benefits.
  • Look for improvements in key focus areas such as infrastructure, tools, services, operating models, and processes.

Your task is not over even after you’ve leveraged mobile/web app maintenance. Application maintenance requires frequent attention as it is not a mere one-time task. You would need to continue to monitor it to stay ahead of your competitors or have a competitive advantage over them. Regular monitoring will keep your app/system bug-free and will ensure an efficient and seamless user experience.

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.

Top 5 Python Frameworks To Opt For

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Building the backend for a web application or service?

It doesn’t matter if it’s simple or complex, there’s a Python framework that can address your needs. Choosing the right one can make tedious implementations like user management, data design, form submissions, and security, less of a headache.

If your project is simple you can opt for something implicit and minimal rather than explicit and complex. Whereas, if you’re working on a big project then you’d need all the firepower a framework can pack. Here are 5 Python backend frameworks that you might want to consider for the backend of your web application.

1. Django

Undoubtedly one of the most known and deployed frameworks, Django has been the go-to choice for enterprises for building web applications for years. With its 3 stable releases, Django has come far in terms of deployment speed. It is now equipped with the new asynchronous ASGI standard for Python web applications.

One of the reasons that Django is so popular is that it comes with batteries-included, meaning all the components that you’d need to develop a generic web application. For instance – user management features like tracking, sessions, passwords, and admin permissions, etc. are common to most web applications. Django provides these features natively.

From a safety POV, Django has some practical defaults to prevent attacks and cross-site scripting issues. While placing a variable in a page template, such as a string with HTML or JavaScript, the contents are not rendered literally unless marked safe.

This Python framework sure is powerful but it comes at the cost of unnecessary complexity; even simpler applications need a lot of configuring to install and run. Django applications are heavy and come with many moving parts. Django is monolithic, meaning apps are chunky and tightly coupled, so everything gets deployed together.

2. CubicWeb

CubicWeb is an object-oriented semantic web app framework. It uses reusable building blocks of code called “cubes”. Cubes are made up of a schema, logic, and views. These components can be utilized as in any other modular framework, each having its function. It lets you build apps by reusing your code and of others.

It’s a powerful Python framework featuring the fundamental building blocks of a modern web application. In CubicWeb, you set up and manage instances with a command-line tool and its built-in templates let you generate HTML output conveniently.

Since CubicWeb doesn’t support the native async functionality some workarounds are required. One of which is to use the cubicweb-worker cube to perform tasks asynchronously. Moreover, it also comes with a lot of dependencies which translates to a daunting list of manual tweaking on the local environment. You can use pip install instead to get them all in one go or you could also use a Docker container to set up shop.

The CubicWeb development has been slow and is not the most promising but it still powers some of the large-scale semantic web and linked open data applications.

3. Web2py

Inspired by the simplicity of Rails, Professor Massimo di Pierro created a simple and easy to set up framework called Web2py. It’s a scalable, open-source full-stack framework for Python which comes with its web-based development environment and features like Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Database Abstraction Layer (DAL), and support for internationalization.

The data abstraction system in Web2py is a bit different from Django’s ORM, which uses Python classes to define models, whereas Web2py uses constructor functions like define_table to instantiate models.

Just like CubicWeb, Web2py doesn’t explicitly use Python’s Async functionality, but it makes up for it with a scheduler for handling long-running tasks.

4. Weppy

Looking at features like data layers and authentication, Weppy will remind you of Django. But when you look at the code it starts looking like Flask, with minimal instruction to get a basic single route setup ready.

Weppy is a lightweight framework and comes with convenience functions, which makes it great for building RESTful APIs. You just have to use @service on a route to get data that is automatically formatted in the format of your choices like JSON or XML. Though lightweight, it packs some big framework features sans the weight and complexity. Validation mechanisms, form handling, response caching, internationalization, and user validation among others are such features.

The not so complex ‘Just enough’ features come with some trade-offs. Weppy extensions try to make up for these trade-offs but unfortunately the list of official add-ons is not that long.

The upcoming Weppy 2.0 will support async and sockets as low-level first-class entities. Also, all the upcoming versions will require Python 3.7 and above to run.

5. Zope

In contrast to every framework mentioned in the list (except for Django) Zope is meant to be a full-blown, enterprise-grade application server stack. For templating, Zope uses a flexible Zope Page Templates (ZPT) system or a basic DTML markup system. While ZPT can be a powerful way to design templates but the syntax takes some getting used to.

While the complexity can be beneficial for enterprise-grade applications, when it comes to installation Zope can be a bit difficult. So much so that it also offers a specialized setup tool called zc.buildout for installation .

If there are no resource constraints and you can look past the unnecessarily complex setup then Zope might prove to be the best for a large undertaking.

One thing to note is that there is no direct support for Python’s async. However, Zope utilizes the zc.async package to distribute tasks across machines and synchronize them in a ZODB instance.

There are a host of choices to base your backend on. It boils down to how much functionality and freedom to tweak are you looking for? All of these frameworks offer something that makes it a unique offering. You just need to truly understand what your solution needs and your choice will be easy and best suited.

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With over a decade of experience in creating and delivering robust software design and development services, our developers know the backend technologies like the back of their hands. Galaxy has expertise in all major backend technologies, be it PHP, Java, Node, and Python. You can spell out your requirements and leave the rest to us. For more information, do visit us here.

Micro Frontend | 4 Things to know before switching

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The first part of this series uncovered the idea of Micro Frontends that is to break down the frontend monolith into smaller, more manageable pieces. (Read the blog here)

Each team can constantly deliver small incremental upgrades, work in their proprietary codebase, independently release versions, own their features end-to-end, and also integrate with other teams via APIs so that they can manage and compose applications and pages together.

This article will share some important decision points to help you decide whether micro-frontends are right for your project, and if so, how do you proceed?

1. Consider the size of your team

Micro frontends enable teams to develop faster and deploy end-to-end features from the database to the user interface on large web applications. An independent team can own and maintain a component without sharing technology or a release process with other teams. That means when a team uses components from other teams, all they need to know is the custom HTML element and its attributes.

Whereas, companies with multiple teams each using a different frontend framework can build a unified component library. For shared code like cookies, local storage, the DOM, and CSS, teams would agree on a namespace convention without any dependencies.

Sep Nasiri from Upwork who leads its UI Infrastructure Team says, “Migrating to a micro frontend architecture introduced some challenges but the benefits of modernizing Upwork’s frontend along the way made it worthwhile. Modernization will help deliver more consistent user experience, streamline certain services, and future-proof our site for Upwork’s 17 million global registered users.”

In essence, micro frontends will help change technologies for an existing application. The team could deliver value gradually by launching parts of the application without attaining much technology debt whenever there is a change in the existing application.

2. Organizational Structure

Similar to building microservices, the basic idea is to allow the DevOps teams to operate and build their micro frontends without any dependency. Remember, their goal is to ship something of value to the business people faster. To allow them to work quickly regarding integration and platform complexity, there should be a Platform Team to support them. The Platform Team is responsible for the platform and ensuring guidelines so that new micro frontends can integrate easily. Ideally, the DevOps teams can ship, develop and plan a new micro frontend without the Platform Team. Besides, they should be able to monitor operational problems and access logs by themselves. Otherwise, the Platform Team will be overloaded and the approach will not scale.

Here is a simplified diagram of the organizational structure:

What is missing from the structure is Governance. If you’re using this approach on a large scale, you need some supervision to avoid uncontrolled growth and to maximize the reuse of existing micro frontends. If you already have a lot of microservices or a WebService catalog, you can do something very similar in that scenario as well.

3. User Experience

Beyond any doubt, User Experience and User Interface Design are the most decisive parts when building systems with micro frontends. This is because a completely heterogenous UI with different behaviors, fonts, and colors is difficult to accept by users and business people alike. So, choose to implement micro frontends after ensuring these decisive points:

  • Provide the developers with CSS (a theme) they can apply during development so they can see how it will look when integrated.
  • Define all common UI components in pure CSS. Then the teams can use the JavaScript framework of their choice as they just have to use the predefined CSS classes.
  • Make sure you have an expressive UI component library that covers not only the single UI elements but also the most important interaction patterns.

4. Multiple client-side libraries and frameworks

Should a team use Vue, Angular, or React for the frontend of a particular component? There are reasons why one library or framework fits better in a situation over the others, and there are pros and cons for each as well. Irrespective of your choice, keep in mind you are not building the web application just so you can use the frameworks; you are choosing the frameworks so that you can build your web application. Just like any architecture, the users will benefit from faster response times from the fewer number of libraries and frameworks you are loading on the client-side.

Because adding another framework means the user experience might become slower due to the additional load. The teams should mutually agree on using the same JavaScript framework whenever possible.

Let’s imagine, the teams got to agree on the same JavaScript framework. Now the teams need to decide that because of the given independence, whether they’re gaining efficiencies on deployment and development or not.

Build modern web apps using microservices with Galaxy Weblinks

The micro frontends and microservices approaches are great techniques to help divide the workload for multiple teams and to isolate code for each Custom Element. It might not be a good idea to choose the added complexity before you need it! Keeping in mind that micro frontends come with extra overhead, the considerations in this article will hopefully help you before implementing this approach.

About Galaxy Weblinks

We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services and have hands-on experience with backend and frontend technologies. With our hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Docker, you can automate the deployment of scalable, future-proof applications.