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25
Th11, 2022

What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)? How Does Infrastructure as Code on AWS work? 

Overview

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the managing and provisioning of infrastructure through code instead of through manual processes.

With IaC, configuration files are created that contain your infrastructure specifications, which makes it easier to edit and distribute configurations. It also ensures that you provision the same environment every time. By codifying and documenting your configuration specifications, IaC aids configuration management and helps you to avoid undocumented, ad-hoc configuration changes.

Version control is an important part of IaC, and your configuration files should be under source control just like any other software source code file. Deploying your infrastructure as code also means that you can divide your infrastructure into modular components that can then be combined in different ways through automation.

Automating infrastructure provisioning with IaC means that developers don’t need to manually provision and manage servers, operating systems, storage, and other infrastructure components each time they develop or deploy an application. Codifying your infrastructure gives you a template to follow for provisioning, and although this can still be accomplished manually, an automation tool. 

Declarative vs. imperative approaches to IaC

There are 2 ways to approach IaC: declarative or imperative. 

A declarative approach defines the desired state of the system, including what resources you need and any properties they should have, and an IaC tool will configure it for you. 

A declarative approach also keeps a list of the current state of your system objects, which makes taking down the infrastructure simpler to manage.

An imperative approach instead defines the specific commands needed to achieve the desired configuration, and those commands then need to be executed in the correct order. 

Many IaC tools use a declarative approach and will automatically provision the desired infrastructure. If you make changes to the desired state, a declarative IaC tool will apply those changes for you. An imperative tool will require you to figure out how those changes should be applied.

IaC tools are often able to operate in both approaches, but tend to prefer one approach over the other.

Benefits of IaC

Provisioning infrastructure has historically been a time consuming and costly manual process. Now infrastructure management has moved away from physical hardware in data centers, though this still may be a component for your organization, to virtualization, containers, and cloud computing. 

With cloud computing, the number of infrastructure components has grown, more applications are being released to production on a daily basis, and infrastructure needs to be able to be spun up, scaled, and taken down frequently. Without an IaC practice in place, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage the scale of today’s infrastructure.

IaC can help your organization manage IT infrastructure needs while also improving consistency and reducing errors and manual configuration.

Benefits:

  • Cost reduction
  • Increase in speed of deployments
  • Reduce errors 
  • Improve infrastructure consistency
  • Eliminate configuration drift

How IaC Works on AWS

Amazon’s market-leading, comprehensive cloud-computing platform, AWS (Amazon Web Services), combines Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and packaged Software as a Service (SaaS). It provides flexible, reliable, scalable, and easy-to-use computing power, database storage, analytics, networking, development tools, enterprise applications, and content delivery services. Launched in 2006 and built on Amazon’s internal infrastructure, AWS was also one of the first companies to introduce these services on a pay-as-you-go model. It dominates cloud computing for several compelling reasons. 

CloudFormation on AWS
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/

AWS covers 245 territories and countries and provides a vast array of

  • Automated services
  • Comprehensive functionality
  • State-of-the-art security
  • Cost-efficiency
  • Scalability
  • Performance
  • Quick and straightforward deployment
  • Systems integration
  • Support and proven operational expertise. 

Meet CloudFormation

So CloudFormation is the AWS IaC tool that serves as an automation platform that allows you to implement services or applications without having to set up and configure each one manually, saving you considerable time and avoiding the potential for mistakes and inconsistencies. Given its ease of use and wide-ranging capabilities, CloudFormation has helped make AWS so popular with companies of all sizes and types. Domain registrar and web-hosting company GoDaddy serves as a perfect example. 

Automating infrastructure management to focus on innovation

With more than 78 million domain names under management, more than 19 million daily entrepreneur/users, and handling more than 300,000 DNS queries per second, GoDaddy is the largest domain registrar/web hosting company in the world. And in 2018, they decided to transform their digital architecture from the on-premises, in-house, data-center model and move everything to the cloud. In doing so, they had three core objectives:

  • Accomplish the migration as quickly as possible.
  • Increase how application stacks are performed and operated.
  • Extend reliability and availability.

They did precisely that when they partnered with AWS and used CloudFormation, AWS Service Catalog and AWS Systems Manager.  

As a result, they could onboard and provision more than 200 accounts (more than 500 landing zones) within approximately one year, automatically provisioning each new onboard in under 2 hours. In addition, by automating the process through IaC, they saved approximately 25,000 hours and about $5,000 per account. They’ve saved more than 100 daily compute rotations just from automating the process and eliminating patching in terms of patching and updating.  This also freed up GoDaddy staff to spend more time working with and innovating for customers. But GoDaddy is by no means the only organization that benefits from IaC and AWS. 

Scaling as needed to support critical applications

In 2018, the Expedia Group planned to migrate 80 percent of its mission-critical apps from on-premises to the cloud. One of the world’s largest full-service online travel agencies, Expedia provides leisure and business travel services to customers around the globe. Committed to innovation and technology, Expedia began using AWS in 2010 when it launched its Expedia Suggest Service (ESS), a typeahead suggestion service that prompts customers to enter correction travel information. But ESS was not created solely for convenience. Expedia metrics showed that error pages were the greatest reason for customer site abandonment. But Expedia faced another challenge: time. 

On-premise vs cloud hosted
Source: https://www.ebcgroup.co.uk/news-insights/on-premises-vs-cloud

On-premises data-center solutions could not compete with decentralized, automated cloud services in terms of eliminating user lag and delays. So, Expedia took to the cloud. In the case study Expedia Group Increases Agility and Resiliency by Going All In on AWS, Expedia Principal Architect Magesh Chandramouli explains, “If an application processes 3,000 requests per second, we would have to configure our physical servers to run at about 30 percent capacity to avoid boxes running hot. On AWS, we can push CPU consumption close to 70 percent because we can always scale-out. Fundamentally, running in AWS enables a 230 percent CPU consumption efficiency in the data processing. We run our critical applications on AWS because we can scale and use the infrastructure efficiently.” 

This kind of success prompted the migration of other Expedia services to AWS. For example, to enable continuous deployment and speed, they used a blue-green deployment approach to create parallel production environments on AWS. They also used the deployment to troubleshoot effectively, scale, and develop applications faster. Expedia Principal Software Engineer Jun-Dai Bates-Kobashigawa also highlights the multifold value of IaC for provisioning, “If there are 100 boxes running, you might have to take 20 boxes out to apply new code. Using AWS, we don’t have to take capacity out; we just add new capacity and send traffic to it.” 

16
Th11, 2022

Flutter vs React Native: When to Choose Flutter Over React

Flutter vs. React Native: In a nutshell

Criteria
Flutter
React Native
What is it?
A portable UI toolkit for building natively-compiled apps across mobile, web, and desktop* from a single codebase
A framework for building native applications using React
Official release
December 2018, Google I/O
March 2015, F8 Conference
Created by
Google
Facebook
Free and open source
Yes
Yes
Programming language
Dart
JavaScript
Popularity
120,000 Stars on Github (May 2021)
95,300 stars on Github (May 2021)
UI
Flutter apps look as good on the up-to-date operating systems as they do on older versions. Since they only have one codebase, the apps look and behave similarly across iOS and Android – but thanks to Material Design and Cupertino widgets, they can also imitate the platform design itself. How’s that possible? Flutter contains two sets of widgets which conform to specific design languages: Material Design widgets implement Google’s design language of the same name; Cupertino widgets imitate Apple’s iOS design. This means that your Flutter app will look and behave naturally on each platform, imitating their native components.
Application components look just like native ones (e.g. a button on an iOS device looks just like a native iOS button, and the same on Android). The fact React Native uses native components under the hood should give you confidence that, after any OS UI update, your app’s components will be instantly upgraded as well. That said, this can break the app’s UI but it happens very rarely. If you want your app to look near-identical across platforms – as well as on older versions of an operating system (as Flutter achieves) – then consider using third-party libraries (like this one). They will enable you to use Material Design components, in place of native ones.
Sharing code
With Flutter 2 (announced in March 2021), we can use the same codebase to ship native apps to five operating systems: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux; as well as web experiences targeting browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Edge. Flutter can even be embedded in cars, TVs, and smart home appliances. (source). Perhaps the single largest announcement in Flutter 2 is production-quality support for the web. It can be used for: Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) that combine the web’s reach with the capabilities of a desktop app, Single Page Apps (SPAs) that load once and transmit data to and from internet services. Existing mobile apps – allowing Flutter apps to be run on a desktop.
iOS and Android – but there are select libraries that allow you to use the same code to build iOS, Android, web, and Windows10 apps. You can also extract shared code in mobile, desktop, and web apps, to a separate repository; treat it as a separate project; then inject it in the same way as another dependency. This allows a developer to focus on writing code for a specific platform without having to consider compatibility with another one. Top apps made with this technology Xianyu app by Alibaba, Hamilton app for Hamilton Musical, Google Ads app, Philips Hue, My BMW Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Ads, Skype, Tesla Time-to-market Typically much faster than native development. Possibly as fast as development with Flutter. However… React Native uses bridge and native elements, so it may require separate optimization for each platform – a problem that widget-based Flutter doesn’t run into. It may make the app development with React Native longer. Competitive advantage Great look and feel thanks to rich widgets; Rapidly growing community, and popularity; Excellent documentation with strong support from the Flutter team (which makes it easy to start developing with Flutter); Improving Flutter for Web, offering the potential for one codebase across mobile and web platforms Difficult to beat time-to-market length Stability (5+ years on the market); Many successful, prominent market players using React Native; Mature, vast community; Easy-to-learn technology; Plenty of tutorials and libraries, which allow quick and easy development; Code can be easily reused for both web app and desktop app development. When it is not the best fit If… • Your app needs to support 3D Touch (for now, Flutter doesn’t support 3D – but it features on the Flutter team’s long-term roadmap) • The design of your app is platform-specific • Your app requires multiple interactions with an OS; or requires rare, little-known native libraries • You need a minimalistic UI, but rely on significant use of the phone hardware (e.g. an application that plays music, or only takes pictures) • You want to create an instant app (small-sized app) If your app sounds like any of the above, it’s probably better you choose native app development. Read more about these cases here >> If… • Your app needs to handle less common, or ultra-specific tasks (like calculations) in the background • You require custom communication via Bluetooth (which can be tricky to implement using React Native) • You want to create an app for Android only In truth, if you want to build an iOS app and you know JavaScript, consider React Native – but if you want an Android-only app, it’s likely better to build natively with another team. Why? Right now, iOS has better support than Android. If your app sounds like any of the above, it’s probably better you consider choosing native app development.
Competitive advantage
Great look and feel thanks to rich widgets; Rapidly growing community, and popularity; Excellent documentation with strong support from the Flutter team (which makes it easy to start developing with Flutter); Improving Flutter for Web, offering the potential for one codebase across mobile and web platforms Difficult to beat time-to-market length
Stability (5+ years on the market); Many successful, prominent market players using React Native; Mature, vast community; Easy-to-learn technology; Plenty of tutorials and libraries, which allow quick and easy development; Code can be easily reused for both web app and desktop app development.

Pros and cons of Flutter

Pros of Flutter

We’ll start with the pros that make Flutter the best choice for the developers. Here’s the list of advantages of Flutter over React Native:

  • It looks great!
  • It’s rich in widgets;
  • The community is rapidly growing
  • Well-structured documentation
  • Permanent improvements for web development
  • It requires less testing
  • The apps are fast
  • It helps to create the same UI for older devices
  • Flutter 2 helps to build apps for the web!

Cons of Flutter

Even though the list of Flutter advantages is impressive, some disadvantages are still important to consider.

  • It is not native
  • The apps are bigger than native ones
  • It still has a limited set of tools and libraries comparing to native apps

These disadvantages are minor, and they do not interfere with app development. However, in some cases, the cons of Flutter may be decisive when choosing a cross-platform development framework.

Flutter Apps Examples

Applications are written in Flutter:

  • Google Ads.
  • Alibaba.
  • Square.
  • eBay.
  • Hamilton Musical.
  • Reflection.

Which one to pick for your next project?

As we can see now, Flutter and React Native have many things in common. First and foremost, they are both open-source frameworks that anyone can use. They both are developed by leading companies: Google created Flutter vs React Native was created by Facebook. To compare basic info about Flutter and React Native, you can check this info by NIX.

Flutter is easier to use as it is more resistant to system updates. It means that when iOS or Android update the OS, the app will remain the same. On the contrary, React Native depends on native elements, so when the update is released, some problems may appear in the launch app. Currently, Flutter supports Android 4.1+ or iOS 8+, while React Native supports Android 4.1+ and iOS 10+. 

The biggest difference between React Native and Flutter is that Flutter has plugins developed by the Google team, like geolocation and mapping. Unfortunately, React Native app works better with apps with a one-time location and does not require tracking. 

All in all, Flutter and React Native are great choices to save time and money on mobile app development. What framework to choose will depend on the preferences of the developer and the company.

29
Th8, 2022

11 Web Development Trends to Expect in 2022

Over the decades, website development has evolved and continues to shift rapidly. As a website owner, you need to be aware of changing website development trends.

Failing to keep up with new trends can result in serious consequences for your website performance and user experience. You may fall behind your competitors and lose traffic to websites offering better experiences.

Developing and maintaining your website according to ongoing trends is the best way to remain competitive in your business niche. Let’s take a closer look at the top trends in website development you can expect in 2022.

1. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) are apps built with web technologies that we probably all know and love, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But they have the feel and functionality of an actual native app. Wait a minute! Native Apps, what do we mean by this?

A Native App is a software application built in a specific programming language for a specific device platform, either IOS or Android.

PWAs are built with the capabilities like push notifications and the ability to work offline. They are also built on and enhanced with modern APIs which makes it easy to deliver improved capabilities along with reliability and the ability to install them on any device.

PWAs takes advantage of the huge web ecosystem this is inclusive of the plugins, and community and the relative ease of deploying and keeping a website contrary to a native application which is pretty difficult to develop. This means you can build a PWA quickly and easily.

With its popularity many companies have shifted into the product, I tend to believe that this is because of its ability to run on an android and iOS without much difference. Some good examples of top companies who have their products as PWAs include: Twitter, Pintrest, Uber, Tiktok, Spotify, Jumia (a leading e-commerce site in Africa) etc…

A common feature about this products is that they are all installable on your home screen, able to work offline from where you last left and offer a comparable experience and features to their native apps.

Just like when building a native mobile app there are some expectations that should be met to make a good product for consumer use, the same thing applies to PWAs. Let’s discuss what makes a good PWA.

2. AI Chatbots

In 2022, AI chatbots are expected to become even more sophisticated in meeting the needs of and matching the behavior of users by leveraging machine learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval techniques.

Besides assisting companies in performing faster operations using voice or text chats, AI-enabled chatbots also help improve the customer experience. They can collect data, answer frequently asked questions, and solve other issues, thereby providing customers with seamless digital experiences with a company.

Many prominent B2C companies already serve their customers with AI chatbots. According to Forbes, marketers’ use of AI increased by 190% between 2018 and 2020, many functioning within Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and Skype, instead of standard chatbots. We can expect more companies to embrace AI chatbots in 2022.

3. Accelerated Mobile Pages

The mobile-first mindset is here to stay – the statement holds true from both the business and consumer side.

To say users, consult their mobiles before making a purchase would be a gross understatement. Mobile internet usage has surpassed desktop mobile usage all over the globe. Even countries such as India, Mexico, and Indonesia have more than 4 times higher smartphone vs. desktop usage:

Screenshot shows total mobile users surpassed desktop users

There are 30 billion mobile moments (the moment a customer consults their phone and expects an immediate answer) every day in the US alone. This means every day your brand has 30 billion mobile opportunities to offer something to users that they want.

And still mobile ad spend lags behind mobile media consumption:

Screenshot shows time spend vs money spent on each platform

There is a reason why users spend more time browsing on mobile instead of buying – users crave instant gratification more when on their mobile devices.

Answer this question – how long do you wait for a mobile webpage to load?

According to data collected by Google and SOASTA 40% of consumers leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

Three seconds.

That’s all the time you have to keep the attention of a user who liked your ad and clicked it. And if your webpage fails to load in the aforementioned time, you created the ad, regardless of how compelling it was, in vain. The bad news is the fact that according to data, most retail mobile sites take around 6.9 seconds to load, that’s more than double the amount of time 40% of users wait before abandoning the page.

4. Single-Page Applications

Single page application (SPA) is a single page (hence the name) where a lot of information stays the same and only a few pieces need to be updated at a time.

For example, when you browse through your email you’ll notice that not much changes during navigation — the sidebar and header remain untouched as you go through your inbox.

The SPA only sends what you need with each click, and your browser renders that information. This is different than a traditional page load where the server re-renders a full page with every click you make and sends it to your browser.

This piece-by-piece, client-side method makes load time much faster for users and makes the amount of information a server has to send a lot less and a lot more cost efficient. A win-win.

5. Optimized Voice Search

Voice search optimization is the process of upgrading and streamlining the information on your pages to appear in voice searches. Voice search optimization aims to optimize your page to answer the questions for people when they conduct verbal searches. This process allows you to have a chance to get your page read by the voice search device(Alexa, Siri, OkGoogle) whenever the user asks for information related to your page.

It’s no secret that voice search is on the rise. In fact, 58% of consumers use voice search to find information about a local business online. (Source: Search Engine Journal). That’s a pretty big number, and that’s why it’s so important to start optimizing your website for voice search today.

So, what can you do to make your website more voice search friendly? Here are a few tips:

  • Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. More and more people are using voice search on their mobile devices, so it’s essential that your website is responsive and easy to navigate on smaller screens.
  • Use long-tail keywords in your content. Voice search is particularly good at answering specific questions, so using long-tail keywords will help you target those queries.
  • Make sure your content is accurate and up-to-date. One of the main complaints about voice search is that results can often be inaccurate. To avoid this, make sure your website’s content is accurate and up-to-date.

6. WordPress Development

Low-code/no-code solutions can reduce the app development time by up to 90%. So there is no surprise that no-code platforms are taking more space in the development world, and WordPress is part of this change.

With the help of visual page builders like Elementor and plugins like Woocommerce for e-commerce and WordPress, you can have a fully functional website or shop in days and at a fraction of the cost you would spend to build it from scratch.

Considering the previous trend about the growth of no-code platforms and the use of WordPress to create fully working websites and apps, this one comes naturally. The no-code platforms simply make SaaS easier than ever to create.

SaaS products have various use cases for B2B and B2C clients, including automating tasks, streamlining business workflows, adding new functionalities or providing an alternative to expensive custom-coded options.

We predict that using WordPress and a suite of plugins will make more entrepreneurs develop and launch interesting SaaS products at a fraction of the cost.

7. Motion UI

Motion UI is the art of leveraging movement and animating within an interface to help guide the user experience and communicate a sequence, next step, transition or action for a digital product. Motion is also used extensively as a branding tool, reinforcing visual cues and interactions which we might associate with a particular brand.   

As humans, our brains are hard-wired to respond to movement. It’s part of our fight-or-flight response and the reason why over 40% of all the nerve fibres connected to the brain are linked to the retina. It’s super-useful when we’re using our peripheral vision to discern danger and protect ourselves. It’s super-annoying when our eyes are attracted to pointless movement and animation on a website which only serves to degrade the functional user experience. 

From the beginnings of motion on the web with the use of the <marquee> tag (to scroll text sideways) to today’s cinematic-quality Motion UI frameworks used by everyday web designers, motion has become one of the most important tools for delivering engagement and interaction across the web. 

These days, the majority of web interface motion is controlled through the browser, leveraging CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript Frameworks. This negates the need for 3rd-party plugins or video players to display motion and animation. 

As the online battle between platforms and brands rages on in the fight for our attention, the need to leverage motion and animation to cut through the noise of the web has never been more critical. When used with restraint, Motion UI is a powerful enabler of beautiful user experiences and can transform a flat, static interaction to a memorable moment of deep engagement with a brand. 

Many pioneering brands obsessed with great user experience have released their own design guidelines with standards and best practices around motion, including Google’s Material Design, Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and the incredibly motion-centric Lottie framework from AirBNB. These guidelines look to synthesize classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science. It’s ultimately about the provision of a unified experience across platforms and devices. 

8. Serverless Architecture

Serverless architecture means the use of computing runtimes, also known as function as a service (FaaS) platforms, which execute application logic but do not store the data. The model offers a completely different economic model of “Pay as you Go” instead of the conventional ways of renting servers and setting up server instances to deploy the code.

Serverless Architecture is the base of serverless computing, a cloud-computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application, rather than on pre-purchased units of hardware capacity.

Serverless computing can simplify the process of deploying code into production. Scaling, capacity planning and maintenance operations may be hidden from the developer or operator. Serverless code can be used in conjunction with previously deployed code in traditional styles, such as microservices.

  • Serverless architecture offers “Pay as you Go” model which is perfect for code where you have to just send simple responses to IOT devices or upload an image or a document.

  • The function as a service (FaaS) platform offers dynamic scalability of machine resources in runtime.

  • In runtime function as a service, the platform finds empty instances on the cloud to run the code when a response is requested from client machines. Hence there is high latency in this architecture so it should not be used to a whole web application.

  • Serverless architecture is best for hosting functions that require high computation power like OCR engines, K-MAP solvers and Linear programming solvers.

  • To put this, in other words, the part of code for which you require a response or solution even if a billion user simultaneously request that code then you must host that code in serverless architecture in conjunction with rest of the code running on a separate server instance.

9. Mobile-friendly Development

Mobile phones have become an inseparable part of our lives. In the second quarter of 2022, mobile platforms account for 58.99% of overall web traffic, which is more than half of the global web traffic. Given this significant mobile usage, designers and developers must focus on delivering seamless website UX on mobile devices. Consequently, website owners must ask themselves.

Developing a website to be mobile-friendly is important but at the same time, the mobile-optimized website should sufficiently deliver a flawless user experience across any device-browser-OS combination.

Mobile devices have significantly changed how people use the internet daily. This trend is set to increase, and more people continue to access the internet primarily via mobile devices yearly. Additionally, as leading search engines like Google continuously seek to make the web a mobile-first search landscape, having a mobile-friendly website must precede developers and testers.

10. Dark Mode Standardization

Dark mode is a website treatment that involves replacing the classic white background, black text look of a website with a dark background and a lighter colored text. Though its current popularity has it feeling like a refreshing dip in a pool on a hot summer day after years and years of staring at bright white screens, the use of black screens in design is nothing new. 

Some of you Gen Y and Elder Millennials surely recall using a computer in the ‘80s with the classic monochrome black screen look. Most of the earliest home computers featured green or white text on plain black backgrounds. 

Habits and expectations have changed with the digital tides, and our understanding of what viewing information looks like — once established by books, notebooks, and newspapers — looks different. 

This has, in many ways, opened up a world of possibilities for the designers who build the websites we now use to obtain most of our information intake. Designers are going back to the drawing board, and rather than considering how to make screens emulate physical paper, they’re asking a different question: What could compelling digital displays be? 

Dark mode is a step in this direction, and also follows other major health-related questions as we all adjust to a life more defined by screens than ever before. For these reasons and more, dark mode isn’t just becoming more popular, but for some people, it’s becoming the expectation. 

11. Improved Native Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity — the practice of securing data, networks, and computers from misuse — is one of the most critical concerns of 2022. Every company, no matter its size, is vulnerable. For example, in June 2021, hackers were able to scrape the accounts of 700 million LinkedIn users to acquire personal information including full names, emails, and phone numbers.

According to CDN provider Cloudflare, the number of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks nearly doubled each quarter in 2020. Hours of downtime, significant loss of revenue, and a damaged reputation are just a few effects of DDoS attacks.

With such an alarming increase in cybercrimes, website development has adapted to make it easier to protect company and customer data. There’s already been a shift toward application-based multi-factor authentication like Google Authenticator, patch management, and Security Operation Centers (SOC).

We’ll be seeing a continuing rise in non-traditional methods to improve cybersecurity as well, beyond monitoring tools and analytics checkpoints. Danny Wajcman, Co-Founder and COO of the heatmapping and live chat software company Lucky Orange, notes the importance of human monitoring in addition to automation: “We firmly believe session recordings can help identify security issues like a DDoS attack or extreme bot traffic…Having a feel for your daily traffic trends and regularly following visitor journeys builds your ability to recognize when something isn’t quite right.”

24
Th8, 2022

Top 10 Backend Frameworks for Web Development in 2022

Web development is generally divided into two categories — Frontend development and backend development. A Backend developer is responsible for building the server-side of a web application.

As the frontend part interacts with the user, the backend part is responsible for the inner working. A frontend may or may not work without a backend but to create a fully functional web application, it is necessary to have a proper backend connected with a frontend.

The role of a backend developer is different from a frontend developer. A frontend developer is more focused on how the application will appear while a backend developer is focused on servers, databases, and how both ends are connected and interacting with each other.

A Backend developer should have many necessary skills. Understanding backend frameworks is one of them. There are several backend frameworks and this article will discuss the top backend frameworks which are used today.

The list includes the best backend framework based upon programming language and tech stack. This means you don’t need to learn all of them, instead choose the one which matches your choice of programming language and tech stack.

1. Spring Framework + Spring boot for Java Developers

Java is regarded as an evergreen programming language. One of its popular use is in backend development. Spring Framework is one of the best Java frameworks.

It was released in 2002 and today, it is one of the most popular backend frameworks that is used to create production-grade spring-based and standalone applications.

It is easy to use Spring boot because it omits various configuration overheads which Spring Framework has. You can get a lot of useful functionalities like caching, transaction management, configuration management, monitoring, security etch when you use Spring Framework projects like Spring Boot, Spring Cloud Spring Security, etc.

If you want to learn Spring Framework and Spring Boot in 2022 and need a resource, then I highly recommend you to join the Spring and Hibernate (includes Spring Boot) course on Udemy. More than 200,000 Java developers have joined this course to learn Spring, Hibernate, and Spring Boot, three of the most essential backend frameworks in Java.

best backend framework for java developers

2. Django for Python Developers

Django is the most popular Python framework used in web development. Based on the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle, Django focuses on code reusing, thus enhancing the development speed. It is also a very secure framework.

Being a Python framework, Django is very user-friendly and easy to learn. It’s also one of the most popular full-stack frameworks and provides a lot of functionality out-of-box like REST API support.

If you want to learn Django in 2022 then I suggest you join Python and Django Full Stack Web Developer Bootcamp course by Jose Portilla on Udemy.

Jose is a great instructor and this 32-hour long Django course is one of the most comprehensive resources to learn Django online.

best backend framework for Python developers

3. Express.js for JavaScript Developers

JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world. With the emergence of Node.js, JavaScript’s popularity in the backend development community increased rapidly and in the last decade, Node.js has become one of the top names.

This is why Express was released in 2010 for node developers. It is a minimal Node.js framework used to develop highly flexible applications.

Given that JavaScript is the most popular web development language and probably the only language which provides full-stack development from front to the backend to mobile learning Expressjs can be a great choice for programmers.

If you want to learn Express.js in 2022 and need a resource, I recommend MERN Stack Front To Back: Full Stack React, Redux & Node.js course by my favorite Udemy instructor Brad Traversy, this course is great for anyone who wants to learn full-stack web development using MERN stack, which includes both React and Express.js.

best backend framework for Javascript developers

4. ASP.NET core for .NET developers

ASP.NET core is the successor of ASP.NET. It is an open-source, platform-independent framework used to build web applications on the .NET platform. It is regarded as one of the best-performing backend frameworks.

It is basically a united version of ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API into a programming module, thus making it more powerful.

If you want to learn ASP.NET core in 2022 and need a resource then I suggest you join The Complete ASP.NET MVC 5 Course by Mosh Hamedani on Udemy. This 7.5 hours course is best for C# and .NET developers who want to learn ASP .NET.

best backend framework for C# developers

5. Laravel for PHP Programmers

PHP is one of the most used programming languages in backend development. Laravel is a PHP framework that is based on MVC architecture. It is a beginner-friendly framework that has a user-friendly interface, extensive library, and brilliant API support.

Using Laravel simplifies the backend development while building modern secure web applications. This is especially true if you are working on non-trivial applications.

If you want to learn Larval and looking for the best online course to learn Laravel for PHP developers then you can also check out PHP with Laravel for beginners — Become a Master in Laravel course on Udemy. This 43 hours long course is one o the best course to learn Laravael online.

best backend framework for PHP developers

6. Ruby on Rails for Ruby Programmers

Ruby on rails, commonly knowns as Rails is a server-side framework based on MVC architecture. It is a beginner-friendly framework that is easy to understand and learn.

However, its advantages and disadvantages are still debated, but it is loved by backend developers throughout the world for being user-friendly.

If you want to learn Ruby on Rails in 2022 and need a resource The Complete Ruby on Rails Developer Course by Rob Percival on Udemy is a great course to join. It has more than 46 hours of content and 157 articles, 8 coding exercises, and 1 downloadable resource.

best backend framework for Ruby developers

7. Fiber Framework for Golang Developers

Fiber is a web development framework for Golang programmers. It is built on top of Fasthttp, the fastest HTTP engine for Go. It’s designed to ease things up for fast development with zero memory allocation and performance in mind

Fiber is a lean but extremely powerful framework. Being extremely lean, it is easy to integrate third-party libraries with Martini. The framework offers more scalability and fewer overhead problems.

It’s similar to Express.js and has great support for routing, serving static files, building REST APIs, Flexible Middleware support, Template engine, and low memory footprint.

If you want to learn more about building web applications using Golang and Fiber, I suggest you join The Complete React & Golang Course by Rob Percival and CodeStars on Udemy. It’s a project-based course where you will build an admin app from scratch using React and Golang Fiber.

best backend framework for Golang developers

8. CakePHP Framework for PHP Developers

CakePHP is another PHP framework that is based on the concepts of another popular backend framework, Ruby on rails.

It follows MVC architecture and offers several useful features such as model-view-controller, front controller, active record, data mapping, and convention over configuration.

If you want to learn CakePHP from scratch and need a resource, I suggest you check out CakePHP for Beginner to Advance with Complete Project course on Udemy. This 6-hour long course is the highest-rated CakePHP course on Udemy and is suitable for beginners and experienced PHP programmers.

best PHP Backend Framework
12
Th8, 2022

Top 10 Web Development Projects in 2022

Humanity has come a long way when it comes to developing the internet and the force behind making it accessible in a convenient way, i.e., web development.

It has experienced an exponential-level evolution from its humble beginnings of developing a static website hosted on a physical system to multi-functionality-harboring web apps stored on distant servers that we commonly use today.

The best part of web development is that it will only be bigger and better from hereon. As such, it has become a lucrative career option in the surviving and thriving IT market.

1. What is Web Development?

Web development refers to the building, creating, and maintaining of websites. It includes aspects such as web design, web publishing, web programming, and database management. It is the creation of an application that works over the internet i.e. websites.

Web Development

The word Web Development is made up of two words, that is:

  • Web: It refers to websites, web pages or anything that works over the internet.
  • Development: Building the application from scratch.

 

Web Development can be classified into two ways:

Frontend Development: The part of a website that the user interacts directly is termed as front end. It is also referred to as the ‘client side’ of the application.

  • Frontend Roadmap:Frontend Development Roadmap
  • HTML: HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is used to design the front end portion of web pages using markup language. It acts as a skeleton for a website since it is used to make the structure of a website.
  • CSS: Cascading Style Sheets fondly referred to as CSS is a simply designed language intended to simplify the process of making web pages presentable. It is used to style our website.
  • JavaScript: JavaScript is a scripting language used to provide a dynamic behavior to our website.
  • Bootstrap: Bootstrap is a free and open-source tool collection for creating responsive websites and web applications. It is the most popular CSS framework for developing responsive, mobile-first websites. Nowadays, the websites are perfect for all the browsers (IE, Firefox, and Chrome) and for all sizes of screens (Desktop, Tablets, Phablets, and Phones).

Frontend Frameworks and Libraries:

Backend Development: Backend is the server side of a website. It is the part of the website that users cannot see and interact. It is the portion of software that does not come in direct contact with the users. It is used to store and arrange data.

  • Backend Roadmap:Backend Design roadmap
  • PHP: PHP is a server-side scripting language designed specifically for web development.
  • Java: Java is one of the most popular and widely used programming language. It is highly scalable.
  • Python: Python is a programming language that lets you work quickly and integrate systems more efficiently.
  • Node.js: Node.js is an open source and cross-platform runtime environment for executing JavaScript code outside a browser.
  • Back End Frameworks: The list of back end frameworks are: Express, Django, Rails, Laravel, Spring, etc.

2. Best Web Development Projects

We know many people, especially students, love free courses, and that’s why we will be dividing our list into three subsections. Anyways, not anymore we will be digressing so, let’s go straight to our selection of the best 10 web development projects.

A Trivia/Quiz Game Using JS (and jQuery)

Objective(s):

  • Develop a basic quiz game that presents players with predetermined questions and multiple choices, out of which only one is the correct option. It can also have a scoring system.

Learning JavaScript – or some other web development technology – is one thing, and applying your knowledge of the same is another. Until you can implement what you’ve learned so far, you won’t be able to advance, whether it’s JS or some other programming language. So, it’s important to work on some projects alongside learning JS.

There are several simple JS projects that you can use to test your knowledge. One such is a basic quiz game. Developing the same will help you build a robust understanding of DOM manipulation, one of the key aspects of JavaScript programming and data management.

You can start with the JS quiz game by only adding a few questions, say 5 or 6. Each question will have 4 choices. You need to put a scoring system in place to make things a little enticing. Since building this game’s primary intent is to learn web development (or JS, particularly), you can easily deal with the game’s designing and styling using a simple CSS framework.

A Duplicate GIPHY (Using the GIPHY API)

Objective(s):

  • Using Giphy’s API to create a web app that takes in search input and displays relevant gifs.

Before you start to template data in JavaScript and display the same on the DOM, you must become well-acquainted with:

  • The DOM manipulation, and
  • jQuery or VanillaJS (just a fancy name referring to using plain JavaScript code)

A great web development project idea that will help you check how well you’ve become in the aforementioned is to develop a replica of GIPHY, the popular online source to conveniently find GIFs scattered across all over the web.

For this purpose, you need to make use of the GIPHY API. It is a beginner-friendly API as it doesn’t necessitate requesting an API key plus, you need not mull over configuration too much for requesting data.

One of the major issues you will face while working on this GIPHY replica project deals with asynchronous requests. You will have two options to do it; either use Vanilla JavaScript or leverage jQuery.ajax() method.

If you wish to increase the web development project’s complexity, you can plan to put data within the app and organize it. For this, you must leverage the namespacing architectural pattern for dealing with issues about scope and conflicts with closures.

With the GIPHY API, you will build a compact web app that will allow users to search gifs, present trending gifs to users following a column format, and hit the “LOAD MORE” button for displaying/loading more gifs.

A Basic To-Do Webapp

Objective(s):

  • Develop a basic to-do app that enables a user to add daily tasks.

Another great idea for a web development project is to develop a basic to-do list webapp. Completing this project requires a beginner to intermediate level adequacy in web development.

The to-do web app must allow users to add new items to a list, and items added to a list must be visible. Also, a user can mark a task “complete” upon its successful completion, and these completed tasks must appear on a separate list, say Completed Tasks.

You can also add a separate section titled Pending Tasks that will list all the tasks that require completion. In such a case, the to-do list will be a union of the Pending Tasks list and the Completed Tasks list. Irrespective of the list, a user must be able to delete or edit tasks from it.

To further increase the web app’s complexity or make it more detailed, you can add the date and time when a task is added and/or completed. If you do not leverage local storage, then the webapp will reset every time it is restarted. Therefore, you can implement the local storage to allow users to resume the app upon restarting, right from where they left it off the last time.

A Basic Survey Form

Objectives

  • To make a basic online survey form.

Surveys are essential tools for collecting data for organizations. More often than not, web developers need to prepare web survey forms, whether it is to get basic details of applications responding to a job opening or to collect user experience about a specific product.

This next web development project idea focuses on developing a basic web-based survey form or questionnaire. It is an easy-to-do thing when you’re well-versed in HTML5or even HTML.

The survey form project is very flexible, and you can prepare it as you find it suitable. Irrespective of the type of questionnaire you want to make, however, you need to add the following fields:

  • Name
  • Age/Birthday
  • Email address
  • Contact Number

The main idea of this project is to assess (or learn) webpage structuring skills. For project enhancement ideas, you can search the web.

Develop a Full Web Project using WordPress

Objectives

  • Develop a full-fledged website with WordPress.

This is a guided project offered by Coursera, the go-to platform for online learners. Build a Full Website using WordPress is an advanced project that necessitates candidates to have a robust working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The web development project is offered in a video lesson format that is 2 hours long. In addition to creating a brand new website from scratch, the Build, a Full Website, using WordPress guided project engages candidates into editing webpage content, images, and links. You will also learn to add and organize widgets to a webpage.

Stacey Shanklin-Langford delivers the project from the Freedom Learning Group. She flaunts a flashy 4.49-star rating – averaged over 184 ratings – out of 5 stars and has over 92k learners enrolled for her 24-course offerings.

The Complete 2020 Web Development Course - Build 15 Projects

Objectives

  • Learn web development by practice. Develop 15 web development projects.

Yes, I know this one is a web development course, but it is replete with projects. There’s not just 1, 2, or even 5, a whopping 15 of them! Moreover, the best thing about this Udemy course is that it is beginner-friendly and allows candidates with intermediate-level web development skills to pick up some more abilities and refine some of their existing ones.

Delivered solely in the English language by Development Island (UK), The Complete 2020 Web Development Course – Build 15 Projects is a comprehensive web development project/course for quickly learning web development. Averaged over 5,355 ratings, the Udemy course gets 4.5 stars out of 5, and over 24k learners have already benefited from the same.

The entire web development course is divided into 33 sections and 504 video lectures that total to 99 hours and 22 minutes of run time. The course starts with discussing the basic structure of a website and the functionality of the same. It discusses a range of technologies, including:

  • AJAX,
  • Bootstrap
  • CSS,
  • HTML,
  • JavaScript,
  • MySQL,
  • NodeJS, and
  • PHP.

It delves into the project building part after discussing a particular set of topics so that you can learn and assess the same simultaneously. The 15 projects that you will develop with this Udemy web development course – in the suggested order – are:

  1. Mathematics Tutorials Website,
  2. Maths Game,
  3. Fruits Slice Game,
  4. App Landing Page,
  5. Company Website,
  6. Our Lovely Course,
  7. Stopwatch App,
  8. Drawing App,
  9. Online File Explorer App,
  10. Online Notes App,
  11. Distance Between Cities,
  12. Website with Social Widgets,
  13. iOS and Android Mobile Apps using jQuery Mobile,
  14. Speed Reader for iOS and Android, and
  15. Car Sharing Website.

As this is a beginner-friendly course, there aren’t any prerequisites. All you need is the will to learn web development and a working computer.

13
Th7, 2022

The 5 most popular programming languages in 2022

Have you ever wonder, which is the best programming language to learn and use in 2022? Should it be the language that you are already familiar with, or should it be an additional language adding to your tech stack in order to lead you to a higher paid job?

That is actually not a simple question to answer. Right now, some programming languages are becoming so popular and saturated in the market, while the others are more trending but does not known by business employers. 

Choosing programming language to learn also depends on what you planning for your career. If you are planning to become a backend web developer, you must know about SQL, JavaScript or Python, or if you are planning to become a mobile developer, Dart, Java or Swift is the right choice for you. Here are some current trending programming languages for 2022:

  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • Java
  • Go
  • TypeScript
  • SQL
  • Ruby
  • Swift
  • Kotlin
If you want to know more and specifically about backend develop, take a look at out blog about backend programming language
Stack Overflow survey - Most commonly used programming languages

You can go straight ahead to the Stack Overflow site to view this survey.

Below are some suggestions, views and thought about those programming languages, with that, you can choose the right “tool” for yourself.

The 5 most popular and trending programming languages in 2022

1. JavaScript

Base on Stack Overflow (a popular forum website for developer) survey in 2020, JavaScript has an 8-year-in-a-row be the most popular language in the market, that’s why it’s also stay on top of our list. Nearly 70% people who participate in the survey said that they have used this language in the past year. Along side with HTML and CSS, JavaScript are becoming a mandatory component for web frontend develop. Almost every website nowadays, including the big ones like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and YouTube, are based on JavaScript to deliver contents and services to their users.

Although born as a frontend language, JavaScript is now can also be used on the server side as a backend one. This creates a runtime environment on the backend server call the Node.js, which helps developers with building web application. Node.js is compatible with almost every OS like Linux, SunOS, Mac OS X and Windows. Moreover, this language has a dynamic syntax, easy to use and work on every browser, really friendly for the newbie. 

2. Python

As of 2022, Python is definitely the best programming language to learn. It topped the list of popularity ratings recently. Everyone who didn’t know it seemed to want to join.

Despite the popularity and sheer number of people with Python skills, it’s a language that many job providers are asking for and paying pretty well.

So what makes Python the thriving language it is now? Although it’s been around since 1991, Python has made a recent comeback and here’s why:

  • It’s easy to write so it’s easy to learn. The readable syntax means you no longer have the headache of looking at your code.
  • At the same time, it is both powerful and extremely versatile. Python can do almost anything. You can use it to write apps, break into high paying tech industries like machine learning or even in web development. And it’s all possible through a wide range of frameworks and libraries, from Django to TensorFlow and to NumPy.
  • The evolution of Python as a language has been amazing and it shows no signs of stopping. This means more jobs, courses, libraries and resources are available to you.

The problem is that Python has been popular for so long that it can easily become oversaturated. The flexibility of the languages ​​alleviates that somewhat, but it’s still something worth reconsidering.

3. Java

The list would be so inaccurate if there aren’t any place for Java. No matter how ancient it may be, job recruiters still can’t seem to get enough.

Java is one of the most powerful programming languages ​​available today, used on more than 15 billion trending technology devices, desktop applications, mobile applications, web development, artificial intelligence. , cloud applications… So, if studying and succeeding in this technology, learners can have very high salaries, good development opportunities and be recognized globally.

Java has some outstanding features such as platform independence, object-oriented programming, enhanced productivity, performance and security, the most secure in terms of security. Many companies are working on Java including Amazon, Adobe, Flipkartv, Instagram…

In addition, if you are already familiar with Java, you can continue with Scala – a language that combines the best features of Java such as object-oriented structure or JVM high-speed environment.

4. Go

Well, here we Go.

Go, aka Golang, is a language favored by Google. It is also one of the best choices for beginners and one of the easiest programming languages ​​to learn. Released in 2012, it is relatively new, so there are still many developers interested in accessing it.

Go is more akin to C-based languages ​​than Python. One of its main uses is developing systems like servers and networking, although you can also use it to create apps or anything else.

As a new language, it may be easier for you to get a job without competing or having more experience. It will also help with your resume, especially coming from Google and many other companies.

5. TypeScript

What is TypeScript? – As a language given to us by Microsoft for free, the foundation of TypeScript is more or less related to JavaScript because it is an open source JavaScript language. TypeScript’s role is to design and build complex large-scale application projects. 

Different from the simplicity of JavaScript, although TypeScript also inherits many definitions and concepts from various languages like C#, Java, etc., but TypeScript has high requirements for clear order. 

TypeScript is considered a more advanced version of JavaScript because it is designed to add more convenient functions, improve on the weaknesses of JavaScript such as object-oriented classes and Static Structural typing, besides TypeScript also can work widely for applications of Angular2 and Nodejs languages.

Conclusion

Why need a long, and meaning-less conclusion when you can just jump right in to 1 of the above and deep dive into it.

All of the above programming languages are mainstream in the tech industry and have a pretty good trending, making it continue to grow and create jobs. That means that when you choose any one of the above languages, it will sure have a pretty good prospect with that choice.

Okay, that’s it all, see you in other blog.

7
Th6, 2022

The Top 10 Tech Trends In 2022 Everyone Must Be Ready For Now

As a futurist, every year, I look ahead and predict the key tech trends that will shape the next few months. There are so many innovations and breakthroughs happening right now, and I can’t wait to see how they help to transform business and society in 2022.

Let’s take a look at my list of key tech trends that everyone should be ready for, starting today.

1. Computing Power

What makes a supercomputer so super? Can it leap tall buildings in a single bound or protect the rights of the innocent? The truth is a bit more mundane. Supercomputers can process complex calculations very quickly.

As it turns out, that’s the secret behind computing power. It all comes down to how fast a machine can perform an operation. Everything a computer does breaks down into math. Your computer’s processor interprets any command you execute as a series of math problems. Faster processors can handle more calculations per second than slower ones, and they’re also better at handling really tough calculations.

Within your computer’s CPU is an electronic clock. The clock’s job is to create a series of electrical pulses at regular intervals. This allows the computer to synchronize all its components and it determines the speed at which the computer can pull data from its memory and perform calculations.

When you talk about how many gigahertz your processor has, you’re really talking about clock speed. The number refers to how many electrical pulses your CPU sends out each second. A 3.2 gigahertz processor sends out around 3.2 billion pulses each second. While it’s possible to push some processors to speeds faster than their advertised limits — a process called overclocking — eventually a clock will hit its limit and will go no faster.

As of March 2010, the record for processing power goes to a Cray XT5 computer called Jaguar. The Jaguar supercomputer can process up to 2.3 quadrillion calculations per second [source: National Center for Computational Sciences].

Computer performance can also be measured in floating-point operations per second, or flops. Current desktop computers have processors that can handle billions of floating-point operations per second, or gigaflops. Computers with multiple processors have an advantage over single-processor machines, because each processor core can handle a certain number of calculations per second. Multiple-core processors increase computing power while using less electricity [source: Intel]

Even fast computers can take years to complete certain tasks. Finding two prime factors of a very large number is a difficult task for most computers. First, the computer must determine the factors of the large number. Then, the computer must determine if the factors are prime numbers. For incredibly large numbers, this is a laborious task. The calculations can take a computer many years to complete.

Future computers may find such a task relatively simple. A working quantum computer of sufficient power could calculate factors in parallel and then provide the most likely answer in just a few moments. However, quantum computers have their own challenges and wouldn’t be suitable for all computing tasks, but they could reshape the way we think of computing power.

2. Smarter Devices

Smart devices are interactive electronic gadgets that understand simple commands sent by users and help in daily activities. Some of the most commonly used smart devices are smartphones, tablets, phablets, smartwatches, smart glasses and other personal electronics. While many smart devices are small, portable personal electronics, they are in fact defined by their ability to connect to a network to share and interact remotely. Many TV sets and refrigerators are also therefore considered smart devices.

3. Quantum Computing

Quantum computing is a rapidly-emerging technology that harnesses the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems too complex for classical computers. 

Today, IBM Quantum makes real quantum hardware — a tool scientists only began to imagine three decades ago — available to thousands of developers. Our engineers deliver ever-more-powerful superconducting quantum processors at regular intervals, building toward the quantum computing speed and capacity necessary to change the world. 

These machines are very different from the classical computers that have been around for more than half a century. Here’s a primer on this transformative technology.

For some problems, supercomputers aren’t that super.

When scientists and engineers encounter difficult problems, they turn to supercomputers. These are very large classical computers, often with thousands of classical CPU and GPU cores. However, even supercomputers struggle to solve certain kinds of problems.

If a supercomputer gets stumped, that’s probably because the big classical machine was asked to solve a problem with a high degree of complexity. When classical computers fail, it’s often due to complexity

Complex problems are problems with lots of variables interacting in complicated ways. Modeling the behavior of individual atoms in a molecule is a complex problem, because of all the different electrons interacting with one another. Sorting out the ideal routes for a few hundred tankers in a global shipping network is complex too. 

4. Datafication

Datafication refers to the collective tools, technologies and processes used to transform an organization to a data-driven enterprise. This buzzword describes an organizational trend of defining the key to core business operations through a global reliance on data and its related infrastructure.

Datafication is also known as datafy. An organization that implements datafication is said to be datafied.

Organizations require data and extract knowledge and information to perform critical business processes. An organization also uses data for decision making, strategies and other key objectives. Datafication entails that in a modern data-oriented landscape, an organization’s survival is contingent on total control over the storage, extraction, manipulation and extraction of data and associated information.

5. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

As a whole, artificial intelligence contains many subfields, including:

  • Machine learning automates analytical model building. It uses methods from neural networks, statistics, operations research and physics to find hidden insights in data without being explicitly programmed where to look or what to conclude.
  • A neural network is a kind of machine learning inspired by the workings of the human brain. It’s a computing system made up of interconnected units (like neurons) that processes information by responding to external inputs, relaying information between each unit. The process requires multiple passes at the data to find connections and derive meaning from undefined data.
  • Deep learning uses huge neural networks with many layers of processing units, taking advantage of advances in computing power and improved training techniques to learn complex patterns in large amounts of data. Common applications include image and speech recognition.
  • Computer vision relies on pattern recognition and deep learning to recognize what’s in a picture or video. When machines can process, analyze and understand images, they can capture images or videos in real time and interpret their surroundings.
  • Natural language processing is the ability of computers to analyze, understand and generate human language, including speech. The next stage of NLP is natural language interaction, which allows humans to communicate with computers using normal, everyday language to perform tasks.
7
Th6, 2022

Does AWS offer a backend as a service?

A majority of organizations are transforming to cloud-based models to enhance user productivity, facilitate a mobile workforce, and obtain an ROI by decreasing the burden of managing IT resources.

Cloud-based models like Amazon Web Services with Backend-as-a-Service (AWS Amplify) are allowing businesses across the globe to stay both current and competitive.

What is a Backend-as-a-Service?

Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) is a cloud service model in which developers outsource all the behind-the-scenes aspects of a web or mobile application so that they only have to write and maintain the frontend. BaaS vendors provide pre-written software for activities that take place on servers, such as user authentication, database management, remote updating, and push notifications (for mobile apps), as well as cloud storage and hosting.

Think of developing an application without using a BaaS provider as directing a movie. A film director is responsible for overseeing or managing camera crews, lighting, set construction, wardrobe, actor casting, and the production schedule, in addition to actually filming and directing the scenes that will appear in the movie. Now imagine if there was a service that took care of all the behind-the-scenes activities so that all the director had to do was direct and shoot the scene. That’s the idea of BaaS: The vendor takes care of the ‘lights’ and the ‘camera’ (or, the server-side* functionalities) so that the director (the developer) can just focus on the ‘action’ – what the end user sees and experiences.

BaaS enables developers to focus on writing the frontend application code. Via APIs (which are a way for a program to make a request of another program) and SDKs (which are kits for building software) offered by the BaaS vendor, they are able to integrate all the backend functionality they need, without building the backend themselves. They also don’t have to manage servers, virtual machines, or containers to keep the application running. As a result, they can build and launch mobile applications and web applications (including single-page applications) more quickly.

What is AWS?

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a comprehensive, evolving cloud computing platform provided by Amazon that includes a mixture of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and packaged software as a service (SaaS) offerings. AWS services can offer an organization tools such as compute power, database storage and content delivery services.

AWS launched in 2006 from the internal infrastructure that Amazon.com built to handle its online retail operations. AWS was one of the first companies to introduce a pay-as-you-go cloud computing model that scales to provide users with compute, storage or throughput as needed.

AWS offers many different tools and solutions for enterprises and software developers that can be used in data centers in up to 190 countries. Groups such as government agencies, education institutions, nonprofits and private organizations can use AWS services.

Does AWS have a Backend-as-a-Service?

Yes, AWS has a BaaS and the service’s name is AWS Amplify. 

AWS offers many services, and the one that is gaining momentum is AWS amplify. AWS Amplify is a full-suite collection of services specifically structured to ease the developing and launching capabilities of mobile and web app developers. 

AWS Amplify makes user experience convenient by unifying the UX across various platforms. It makes full-stack development easier with its scalability and gives users the flexibility to choose the platform they want to run the app on. Most importantly, it allows users to integrate a range of functions securely and quickly with the developed app. 

Now, let’s look into the features of AWS mobile backend service.

  • Authentication

AWS Amplify features a fully operated user directory and pre-designed multi-factor authorization workload to help developers create faultless onboarding flows. It also allows users to log in through various social media platforms. 

  • Security and Storage

AWS Amplify offers an easy and secured data storing option. App developers can securely sync information between various applications with the help of Amazon S3 and Amazon AppSync. Users are also allowed to synchronize easy offline procedures. 

  • Analytics

AWS Amplify allows developers to track web page metrics and user sessions for analytics. The service features an auto-tracking procedure to get access to real-time data and analyze it for gaining customer insight. Amplify supports building marketing strategies to drive customer retention and engagement. 

  • Storage

AWS Amplify manages and stores user-generated content, such as photos and videos on the cloud. All these functions are operated through a simple mechanism followed by the AWS Amplify storage module that manages user content and protects the storage buckets. 

Now, let’s look into the advantages of AWS Amplify.

  • UI-Driven

AWS Amplify supports UI-driven, fast, and easy approach to developing web and mobile applications. With this modern UI component, developers do not have to code any app and the CLI processes make the app development process easier, simplifying the workflows and speeding up the app development process. 

  • Usage-Based Payment

AWS Amplify offers a usage-based payment option. Users have the authority to choose from various services. The flexible and cost-efficient feature of AWS Amplify requires its users to pay only for the services they choose.

  • Start for Free

AWS Amplify requires its users to set up a paid tier only after they achieve an optimum number of technical requirements. 

3
Th6, 2022

Top 10 Backend Programming Languages

All server-side operations and interactions between the browser and database are referred to as backend development. Servers, databases, communication protocols, operating systems and software stack are the core tools used in backend development.

JavaScript, PHP, Python, Java and Ruby are the known backend programming languages that most backend developers are using nowadays.

A survey of W3Techs claims that PHP is the most used backend language. Around 79.2% of web applications are using PHP as server-side applications.

On the other hand, Stack Overflow’s 2020 Developer Survey shares that JavaScript is the top most used scripting language. Indeed, JavaScript got 69.7%, Python earned 41.6%, and PHP received 25.8% votes from professional developers in this survey.

1. JavaScript

JavaScript (JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, or just-in-time compiled programming language with first-class functions. While it is most well-known as the scripting language for Web pages, many non-browser environments also use it, such as Node.js, Apache CouchDB and Adobe Acrobat. JavaScript is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm, single-threaded, dynamic language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and declarative (e.g. functional programming) styles. Read more about JavaScript.

This section is dedicated to the JavaScript language itself, and not the parts that are specific to Web pages or other host environments. For information about APIs that are specific to Web pages, please see Web APIs and DOM.

The standards for JavaScript are the ECMAScript Language Specification (ECMA-262) and the ECMAScript Internationalization API specification (ECMA-402). The JavaScript documentation throughout MDN is based on the latest draft versions of ECMA-262 and ECMA-402. And in cases where some proposals for new ECMAScript features have already been implemented in browsers, documentation and examples in MDN articles may use some of those new features.

Do not confuse JavaScript with the Java programming language. Both “Java” and “JavaScript” are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle in the U.S. and other countries. However, the two programming languages have very different syntax, semantics, and use.

2. PHP

PHP (originally stood for Personal Home Page, then renamed to Hypertext Preprocessor) is an open-source server-side scripting language, developed in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf specifically for the web. What now makes PHP different than, for example, JavaScript is that the code is executed on the server, generating HTML which is then sent to the client. The client receives the results of running that script but doesn’t know what the underlying code was. 

Since its creation, PHP has become extremely popular and successful – almost 80% of websites are built in PHP, including web giants like Wikipedia, Facebook, Yahoo!, Tumblr and many more. PHP is also the language behind the most popular CMS (Content Management Systems) such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, WooCommerce and Shopify. PHP is a universal programming language that allows for building landing pages and simple WordPress websites, but also complex and massively popular web platforms like Facebook. 

PHP is also considered as easy to learn (at least on an entry-level) and, according to StackOverflow’s annual survey, is the most popular programming language of 30% of software developers. 

3. Ruby

Rails, or Ruby on Rails, is an open-source framework written with the Ruby programming language and founded in 2003 by David Heinemeier Hansson.

Ruby on Rails companies don’t have to rewrite every single piece of code in the process of web application development, thus reducing the time spent on basic tasks.

The number of websites built with the framework account for 350,000+ all over the world, and this number is rapidly growing.

Open Source status is the first thing to take into consideration when choosing the right back-end framework. This means Ruby on Rails is free and can be used without any charge.

The past few years have provided us with many success stories of startups that were able to launch a new web project on Ruby on Rails and acquire their first customers — all within a few weeks. Everything is possible thanks to a huge community and the support you can get as a result.

Benefits of Ruby on Rails Framework

  • Ruby on Rails MVC
  • Extensive ecosystem
  • Consistency and clean code
  • DRY
  • High scalability
  • Security
  • Time and cost efficiency
  • RAD
  • Self-documentation
  • Test environment
  • Convention over configuration

4. Python

Python is a general-purpose programming language used in web development to create dynamic websites using frameworks like Flask, Django, and Pyramid. For the most part, Python runs on Google’s Apps Engine.

Unlike Java which is a compiled language, Python is an interpreted language. It is generally slower than the compiled languages. This makes Python lose to Node.js in terms of performance.

Python is not suitable for apps that require high execution speed. This is because of the single flow of code in Python which leads to slow processing of requests. Python web applications are therefore slower.

Python does not support multithreading. Therefore, scalability is not as easy. For Python to have easy scalability, libraries have to be used. However, this does not mean that it can compete with Node.js in terms of scalability.

Python is a full-stack language. It is used in backend development while its frameworks are used in frontend development.

A Python program can be written in MAC OS and the same program can run in Linux, therefore Python is also a cross-stage languague.

Python is a good language for web development as well as desktop development. But unlike Node.js it is not primarily used in mobile app development.

After the introduction of Python, a lot of frameworks and development tools like PyCharm have been created.

The great extensibility of Python and the use of many frameworks have made Python to be such a great backend language that every developer would desire to use.

Python frameworks include:

  1. Django
  2. Flask
  3. Web2Py

Python is not event-driven. To build an event-driven app using Python, you need to install a tool like CPython.

Although Python enables asynchronous programing it is not frequently used like Node.js as it is limited by Global interpreter lock which ensures that only one process executes at a time.

5. Java

Java is highly scalable. Take the case of Java EE. Assuming you have done the right planning and used the right kind of application server, the Java EE can transparently cluster instances. It also allows multiple instances to serve requests.

In Java, separation concerns allow better scaling. When processing or the number of Input-Output (IO) requests increases, you can easily add resources, and redistribute the load. Separation of concerns makes this transparent to the app.

Java components are easily available, making scaling of large web apps easy. The language is flexible, and you need to do less invasive coding to improve scalability. Read more about it in this StackOverflow thread on Java scalability.

One great advantage of Java is “Write Once, Run Everywhere”. We also call this feature ’portability’. You can execute a compiled Java program on all platforms that have a corresponding JVM.

This effectively includes all major platforms, e.g. Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Read more about the cross-platform feature of Java in this StackOverflow thread titled “Is Java cross-platform”.

You first write your Java program in the “.java” file. Subsequently, you compile it using the Ecplise IDE or ’javac‘, and thereby you create your “.class” files. While it isn‘t mandatory, you can also bundle your “.class” file into a “.jar” file, i.e. an executable.

You can now distribute your “.jar” file to Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, and run it there. There may be occasional confusion, because you may find different set-up files for different platforms for one Java program. However, these have nothing to do with Java.

There are applications that depend on specific features certain platforms provide. For such apps, you need to bundle your Java “.class” files with libraries specific to that platform.

Java’s automatic memory management is a significant advantage. I will describe it briefly here to show how it improves the effectiveness and speed of web apps.

In programming parlance, we divide memory into two parts, i.e. the ’stack’ and the ’heap’. Generally, the heap has a much larger memory than the stack.

Java allocates stack memory per thread, and we will discuss threads a little later in this article. For the time being, note that a thread can only access its own stack memory and not that of another thread.

The heap stores the actual objects, and the stack variables refer to these. The heap memory is one only in each JVM, therefore it‘s shared between threads. However, the heap itself has a few parts that facilitate garbage collection in Java. The stack and heap sizes depend on the JVM.

Now, we will analyze the different types in which the stack references the heap objects. The different types have different garbage collection criteria. Read more about it in “Java Memory Management”.

Following are the reference types:

  1. Strong: It‘s the most popular, and it precludes the object in the heap from garbage collection.
  2. Weak: An object in the heal with a weak reference to it from the stack may not be there in the heap after a garbage collection.
  3. Soft: An object in the heap with a soft reference to it from the stack will be left alone most of the time. The garbage collection process will touch it only when the app is running low on memory.
  4. Phantom reference: We use them only when we know for sure that the objects aren‘t there in the heap anymore, and we need to clean up.

The garbage collection process in Java runs automatically, and it may pause all threads in the app at that time. The process looks at the references that I have explained above and cleans up objects that meet the criteria.

It leaves the other objects alone. This entire process is automated; therefore, the programmers can concentrate on their business logic if they follow the right standards for using reference types.

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Th6, 2022

What is MongoDB? Why should you use it?

What is MongoDB?

MongoDB is an open source NoSQL database management program. NoSQL is used as an alternative to traditional relational databases. NoSQL databases are quite useful for working with large sets of distributed data. MongoDB is a tool that can manage document-oriented information, store or retrieve information.

MongoDB supports various forms of data. It is one of the many nonrelational database technologies that arose in the mid-2000s under the NoSQL banner — normally, for use in big data applications and other processing jobs involving data that doesn’t fit well in a rigid relational model. Instead of using tables and rows as in relational databases, the MongoDB architecture is made up of collections and documents.

Organizations can use Mongo DB for its ad-hoc queries, indexing, load balancing, aggregation, server-side JavaScript execution and other features.

How it works?

MongoDB makes use of records which are made up of documents that contain a data structure composed of field and value pairs. Documents are the basic unit of data in MongoDB. The documents are similar to JavaScript Object Notation, but use a variant called Binary JSON (BSON). The benefit of using BSON is that it accommodates more data types. The fields in these documents are similar to the columns in a relational database. Values contained can be a variety of data types, including other documents, arrays and arrays of documents, according to the MongoDB user manual. Documents will also incorporate a primary key as a unique identifier.

Sets of documents are called collections, which function as the equivalent of relational database tables. Collections can contain any type of data, but the restriction is the data in a collection cannot be spread across different databases.

The mongo shell is a standard component of the open source distributions of MongoDB. Once MongoDB is installed, users connect the mongo shell to their running MongoDB instances. The mongo shell acts as an interactive JavaScript interface to MongoDB, which allows users to query and update data, and conduct administrative operations.

A binary representation of JSON-like documents is provided by the BSON document storage and data interchange format. Automatic sharding is another key feature that enables data in a MongoDB collection to be distributed across multiple systems for horizontal scalability, as data volumes and throughput requirements increase.

The NoSQL DBMS uses a single master architecture for data consistency, with secondary databases that maintain copies of the primary database. Operations are automatically replicated to those secondary databases for automatic failover.

MongoDB pros and cons

Advantages of MongoDB

Performance Levels

MongoDB stores most of the data in the RAM. It allows a quicker performance while executing queries. 

It collects the data directly from the RAM than the hard disk and the returns come back faster. It is important to have a system with RAM and accurate indexes for enhanced performance levels.

High Speed and Higher Availability

MongoDB is a document-based database solution. It has attributes like replication and gridFS.

Its attributes allow an increase in data availability. It is also easy to access documents using indexing. 

MongoDB performs 100 times faster than other relational databases and provides high performance.

Simplicity

MongoDB offers a simple query syntax that is much easier to grasp than SQL. It provides an expressive query language that users find helpful during development.

Easy Environment and a Quick Set-up

The installation, setup, and execution for MongoDB are quick and simple. It is faster and easier to set up than RDBMS and offers modern JavaScript frameworks.

This feature has allowed users to confidently select NoSQL structures. It also provides quicker learning and training opportunities than SQL databases. 

Flexibility

MongoDB’s schema is not predefined. It means that it has a dynamic schematic architecture that works with non-structured data and storage. 

Businesses keep evolving and so do the data they maintain. It is important to have a flexible database model that could adapt to these changes.

Sharding

MongoDB uses sharding while handling large datasets. Sharding is the process of dividing data from a large set and distributing it to multiple servers.

In case, there is an issue where the server cannot handle the data due to its size, it automatically divides it further without pausing the activity. 

Scalability

Scalability is one of the most important advantages of MongoDB. As seen, MongoDB uses “sharding”, which expands the storage capacity.

Unlike SQL databases that use vertical scalability, sharding allows MongoDB to use horizontal scalability.

Ad-hoc Query Support

An ad-hoc query is a non-standard inquiry. It is generated to gain information if and when required.

MongoDB offers an enhanced ad-hoc queries feature. This allows an application to prepare for fore coming queries that may occur in the future.

Documentation

MongoDB is in the class of “Document Stores”, here the term document refers to data collection.

MongoDB offers accurate documentation which means it does not tether with the data while processing it for storage. It serves the data for each version, edition, or requirement to assist users with an excellent documentation process.

Technical Support

MongoDB offers technical support for the various services that it provides. There is technical support for the community forums, Atlas or Cloud Manager as well as Enterprise or Ops Manager.

In case of any issues, the professional customer support team is ready to assist clients. 

Disadvantages of MongoDB

Transactions

Transactions refer to the process of reviewing and eliminating unwanted data. MongoDB uses multi-document ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) transactions.

The majority of the application does not require transactions, although there are a few that may need it to update multiple documents and collections. This is one of the major limitations with MongoDB as it may lead to corruption of data.

Joins

Joining documents in MongoDB can be a very tedious task. It fails to support joins as a relational database.

Although there are teams deployed to fix this disadvantage, it is still in the initial stages and would take time to mature. 

Users can utilize joins functionality by manually adding the code. But acquiring data from multiple collections requires multiple queries and this may lead to scattered codes and consume time.

Indexing

MongoDB offers high-speed performance with the right indexes. In case if the indexing is implemented incorrectly or has any discrepancies, MongoDB will perform at a very low speed.

Fixing the errors in the indexes would also consume time. This is another one of the major limitations of MongoDB.

Limited Data Size and Nesting

MongoDB allows a limited size of only 16 MB for a document. Performance nesting for documents is also limited to only 100 levels.

Duplicates

Another one of the major limitations of MongoDB is the duplication of data. The limitation makes it difficult to handle data sets as the relations are not defined well.

Eventually, the duplication of data may lead to corruption as it is not ACID compliant.

High Memory Usage

MongoDB requires a high amount of storage due to the lack of joins functionalities which lead to the duplication of data. There is an increase in data redundancy which takes up unnecessary space in the memory.

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