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Application Architectures: for many organizations, the existing architecture, and systems that support customer- or employee-facing apps are outdated and cannot be scaled or built upon as quickly as required by today’s realities—especially when it comes to
supporting the demands of mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Companies may want to develop new apps, create new customer experiences or expose data to partners or third-party developers, but tremendous improvements to infrastructure, process, management, connectivity, and security are needed to support that plan. This problem is exacerbated when working with partners that use different protocols and databases, making it difficult to connect efficiently.
A new digital transformation layer is needed to help benefit from investments in mobile and IoT, integrate new acquisitions or optimize the partner supply chain. Continue reading
Open source development brings speed and creativity, but it can also fundamentally change how users employ tech. MIT’s Open Agriculture Initiative illustrates this point. – Modern app development
BOSTON — During conversations about open source technology for developers, common words included speed, experimentation — and empathy.
Yes, empathy is a key to open source success, according to folks at Red Hat Summit 2017. The idea rests on the notion that while development speed is great and innovation is necessary — both hallmarks of open source work and modern app development, vendors said — programmers must also stay aware about how next-generation technology can affect users.
The work of the Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAg) at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass., offers a good example. The OpenAg project works with Red Hat to develop open source agricultural software, with the goal of creating a more agile way to encourage food production among small, local communities.
In other words, residents in a city borough might someday be able to use open source tech and modern app development strategies to grow their own food. Technologists currently undertake that activity in the MIT Media Lab by studying digital farming and plant physiology, growing broccoli via an IP address attached to sensors.
Caleb Harper, director and principal investigator at OpenAg, told attendees at the Red Hat Summit that digital transformation technology could make it possible to introduce 1 billion new farmers into urban neighborhoods along the way to establishing digital growing areas. Continue reading
There’s a lot of information about DevOps out there, making it hard to determine exactly what it means. However, there are still key principles you can stick to in order to achieve success through DevOps. Here are four questions that, according to our experts, you should be asking when thinking about your DevOps strategy.
DevOps tasks should be clearly connected to the applications they support, and businesses should, in turn, identify the business processes those applications support. This lets organizations map out what is referred to as a zone of business impact for each DevOps process, and it’s a fundamental part of DevOps documentation. That way, as expert Tom Nolle points out in his piece on the connection between DevOps and enterprise architecture, the impact any DevOps strategy has on business processes — even if the impact is simply a risk of disruption — can be planned for ahead of time. This will also ensure that development teams understand the business process lifecycle or even lifecycles, that their application may impact.
Implementing continuous delivery means that changes to your application are created and deployed on an ongoing basis. If your apps are not being delivered continuously, it’s important to start thinking about building a continuous delivery pipeline for them by making sure that everyone involved in app development and delivery is working together. According to expert Chris Tozzi in his piece on applying DevOps principles to app modernization, part of this means ensuring you have the infrastructure tools in place to roll out changes quickly from development to production. Continue reading
Low-code tools let nearly anyone build mobile applications quickly and efficiently. Here’s why these development tools will continue to grow in popularity.-Low-Code Development 
A new category of mobile software developers is coming, and, surprise, they’re not actually developers. Thanks to a growing number of low-code development platforms, nearly anyone with some enthusiasm and patience can build mobile and web applications today. And they can do it quickly.
These new tools essentially do the hard work developers had to do — from data management and integration to visual configuration of business logic tools, built-in rules for development and delivery, and emphasis on drag-and-drop elements, according to the Forrester Research Wave report, “Low-Code Development Platforms, Q2 2017.” This is a way companies can “bring people into the development organization and rapidly drive innovation and compete with the unicorns,” said Robert Stroud, principal analyst for infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester. With these new platforms, Stroud said so-called citizen developers are for the first time “really able to leverage IT.” Continue reading
Lean software development is a concept that emphasizes optimizing efficiency and minimizing waste in the development of software. This approach has its roots in the lean manufacturing movement of the 1980s but is now considered an integral part of the Agile software development methodology.
Lean principles center on the idea that less is more, and they aim to streamline every part of the software development lifecycle.
The concept is that efficiencies can be applied and waste can be managed at all levels: each individual, every department, interdepartmental operations, the organization as a whole, and the relationships of the organization with customers and suppliers.
When it comes to waste, the lean philosophy has a very broad definition that includes anything that doesn’t add value to the product. A lean product development team should focus on learning and, because of the strong demand for software applications today, should decide on features as late as possible to eliminate the need to redo work as the market changes. At the same time, there is equal pressure to deliver as fast as possible. Continue reading
The developer is in demand more than ever, and yet the role still alludes most in the IT world. With some insight into cloud computing, platforms, and ecosystems, development processes can be more clearly defined, and the part of the developer will come into focus. – App Development for the Cloud
Look at any job board, and it would be difficult not to see the trend— companies are hiring developers. Whether they need cloud apps, mobile apps or someone to make business work when it doesn’t, companies are heralding developers as the solution to a host of problems. But while developers are in demand, knowledge of what they do is in short supply. The reason is much of what developers do is shrouded in mystery to those outside their world. In this article, we explore issues and trends in cloud development, broken down so those who think Python is a snake and Java a cup of coffee will understand. Continue reading
DevOps can help develop software faster, but that’s not making it any safer. DevSecOps is an effort to bring security into the mix. Here are some ways to get started.
Call it DevSecOps or SecDevOps or security in DevOps, but no matter what you call it your development organization will be tackling it soon.
DevOps is hard to do and security is harder. But at a time when security breaches continue to dominate the headlines, there’s no question that security and DevOps need to come together. The only issues are when and how.
A recent survey by DevOps software supply chain provider Sonatype found that for every 100 developers there is only one security person, and that’s a huge part of the reason breaches continue, said Derek Weeks, vice president and DevOps evangelist at Sonatype. “Those numbers leave you completely outnumbered and that’s not going to change anytime soon,” he said. Continue reading
Why the Python programming language shines for data science, machine learning, systems automation, web and API development, and beyond.
Dating from 1991, Python is a relatively new programming language. From the start, Python was considered a gap-filler, a way to write scripts that “automate the boring stuff” (as one popular book on learning Python put it) or to rapidly prototype applications that will be implemented in one or more other languages.
However, over the past few years, Python has emerged as a first-class citizen in modern software development, infrastructure management, and data analysis. It is no longer a back-room utility language, but a major force in web application development and systems management and a key driver behind the explosion in big data analytics and machine intelligence.
Python’s success revolves around several advantages it provides for beginners and experts alike: Continue reading