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Cloud-based applications are the future. Soon, cloud apps that are accessed using any device with a Web browser and Internet access will replace traditional legacy apps. But with so many applications… Continue reading
Today’s businesses are faced with a singular reality: innovation is a requirement for mere survival. Yet many enterprises are crippled by legacy and technical debt. – … Continue reading
To choose between native and third-party low-code tools, cloud application development teams need to weigh the benefits of consolidation against the risk of lock-in.
s the adoption of no-code and low-code platforms grow, some… Continue reading
Machine learning isn’t only in the cloud. Microsoft is bringing it to PCs in the next Windows 10 release. Here’s how to get started now.
We’re not far away from a new release of Windows 10, and with it plenty of new APIs for your applications. One big change is support for running trained machine learning models as part of Windows applications, taking advantage of local GPUs to accelerate machine learning applications.
Building a machine learning application can be a complex process. Training a model can require a lot of data, and a considerable amount of processing power. That’s fine if you’ve got access to a cloud platform and lots of bandwidth, but what if you want to take an existing model from GitHub and run it on a PC?
Trained machine learning models are an ideal tool for bringing the benefits of neural networks and deep learning to your applications. All you should need to do is hook up the appropriate interfaces, and they should run as part of your code. But with many machine learning frameworks and platforms, there’s a need for a common runtime that can use any of the models out there. That’s where the new Windows machine learning tools come into play, offering Windows developers a platform to run existing machine learning models in their applications, taking advantage of a developing open standard for exchanging machine learning models. Continue reading
Cloud-native apps built on Kubernetes can run anywhere. Now, with Open Service Broker, they can also use services hosted in public clouds such as Azure. – Cloud Software Development 
Back in the early 2000s, while working as an architect in an IT consulting company, I became fascinated by the promise of service-oriented architectures. Taking an API-first approach to application development made a lot of sense to me, as did the idea of using a message- and event-driven approach to application integration.
But that dream was lost in a maze of ever-more complex standards. The relatively simple SOAP’s take on remote procedure calls vanished as a growing family of WS- protocols added more and more features.
It’s not surprising, then, that I find much of what’s happening in the world of cloud-native platforms familiar. Today, we’re using many of the same concepts as part of building microservice architectures, on top of platforms like Kubernetes.
Like SOAP, the underlying concept is an open set of tools that can connect applications and services, working in one public cloud, from on-premises systems to a public cloud, and from cloud to cloud. It’s that cross-cloud option that’s most interesting: Each of the three big public cloud providers does different things well, so why not build your applications around the best of Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform? Continue reading
Progressive web apps offer many benefits, leading organization
s to take advantage of this trend in mobile app dev. A lack of Apple support stands in the way for some. As performance and user experience become essential to the success of an enterprise mobile app, progressive web apps gain interest — and may eventually become the future standard for mobile development.
Progressive web apps (PWAs) blend the functionalities of traditional web apps with native apps while providing increased speed and performance. Several aspects of the mobile app development landscape today make it primed for this trend to take hold.
“If you’re building a web app today, it should be a PWA,” said Michael Facemire, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. “There’s really no reason not to.”
PWAs run on the web but can take advantage of native mobile device features, such as appearing on the home screen and sending push notifications. Google supports PWAs for use on Android device browsers, but Apple does not yet support them for its proprietary browser, Safari, on iPhones or iPads. PWAs differ from hybrid web apps in that they are typically not available for download through native app stores and are built using only web technologies.
For PWAs on Android, a service worker API caches data as the user browses to enable offline support. Most PWAs also include an application shell architecture that allows for fast loading times, transport layer security, and a web app manifest file that allows the app to be installed on the home screen, according to Google’s checklist of features.
There may be no difference between a PWA and a native app from the end user’s perspective. That’s beneficial for IT departments that already have an app interface their users or customers are comfortable with.
That was a big benefit for Nexercise, a health and wellness platform that is currently building a PWA for Sworkit, a fitness application. The Sworkit app was first developed for Apple iOS and Android, then the web and Apple TV. Since its web and native apps already shared some JavaScript code, it made sense to develop a PWA, said David Frahm, director of growth at Nexercise in Silver Spring, Md., who oversaw Sworkit’s development.
“Visually, might look pretty much the same as our web app,” Frahm said. “That would be great, because we have a great app, and we don’t want to change all of that. We get to deliver to users wherever they want us to be, as opposed to being limited to the app store.” Continue reading
Rapid mobile application development vendors offer a variety of options, from low-code and no-code platforms to micro apps, workflow apps and more.
Rapid application development tools can help organizations more easily mobilize business processes and workflows.
The demand for enterprise mobile apps has never been greater, but it remains complex and expensive to build and deploy them. Rapid mobile application development tools aim to break down these barriers.
Some of these tools enable employees with little to no coding skills to build apps using a graphical user interface. Others create simple apps that perform only a few tasks — or even just one.
Several vendors on the market take these and other approaches. Let’s take a look at them and their rapid application development tools.
Alpha Anywhere, Alpha Software Corp.’s platform, provides both no- and low-code rapid application development tools. Developers and others can use these tools to create web apps, hybrid mobile apps — through integration with Adobe’s PhoneGap Build service — and mobile forms.
With Alpha Anywhere’s offline capabilities, users of apps built on the platform can save data on their devices if they don’t have internet connectivity. Also, IT can control how that data synchronizes with back-end applications and databases when a connection is restored.
It seems like every year will be — or at least should be — the year of software engineering quality, but somehow 2018 feels different. Pride in workmanship is what drives developers to create better software, and that can’t be
standardized.
A 2017 survey conducted by research firm Coleman Parkes for the software analysis and measurement company Cast asked developers what factors led them to produce high-quality software. Respondents didn’t cite industry standards much (just 8%) and instead said they were inspired by pride in workmanship (20% of those surveyed).That’s great, as far as it goes, but Bill Curtis, chief scientist at Cast, said much bigger forces will also put software engineering quality under the microscope.
Security breaches and app failures mean quality is now a boardroom-level issue, he said, and that will mean sweeping changes in software development trends. In 2017, just one-third of developers were actually graded on software engineering quality, the Cast survey showed. That will change. “IT organizations will demand greater accountability from their software suppliers and will request a certification of code quality, with penalties when it is insufficient, in 2018,” Curtis said.
Software engineering quality has been completely insufficient for far too long, according to app users, said Theresa Lanowitz, head analyst at Voke Research. Consumers are tired of apps that don’t work, and she tied that directly to the trend in software development to focus on speed rather than quality. Continue reading
Software development is a tedious process and can often be challenging. The process consists of various successive phases which have to be performed in an organized manner. – Software developers
Custom software development includes heavy consideration to requirements, a focus on overall objectives, the creative design process, and the actual process of writing the code necessary to ensure optimal software functionality. Unfortunately, many software development projects ultimately fail due to poor execution.
Before embarking on the development process, it’s essential to have your custom software project completely outlined and organized. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll introduce you to 10 questions to ask when developing software. Not only will these questions aid in outlining the purpose and intent of the software, but also in the successful execution and completion of your software development project.
Before beginning your custom software development project, it’s imperative that you know and understands the most common mistakes made in the development process. By becoming familiar with these mistakes before the initiation of the project, you will be better able to avoid making the same ones. Continue reading
Multi-cloud, blockchain and more sophisticated PaaS tools are three trends expected to reshape app development practices in 2018. Is your team ready for the change? – App development
Experts expect 2018 to be a year of change for cloud app development, as trends like DevOps, hybrid cloud and blockchain continue to take off.
Here’s a closer look at these and other emerging trends, what they’ll mean for enterprise app development teams and the potential challenges and risks they pose.
In 2018, vendors will attempt to improve their platform as a service (PaaS) offerings to speed up application development and support DevOps workflows. Leading cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, will continue to roll out tooling to automatically provision PaaS-like capabilities via containers and Kubernetes. In addition, CIOs and app development teams will start to take advantage of higher-level service mesh tools, such as Istio and Linkerd, to recreate the benefits of monolithic apps within a collection of microservices.
However, these more sophisticated cloud tools come with potential vendor lock-in risks, said David Bartoletti, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. For example, AWS provides a set of tools to automatically provision containers with its Elastic Container Service, but those tools won’t necessarily help developers who need to move apps to private infrastructure or manage apps that span cloud platforms. Continue reading