Qualcomm Inc., stepping up its long-running effort to break into the personal computer market, unveiled a new laptop processor designed to outperform rival products from Intel Corp. and Apple Inc. The new Snapdragon X features 12 high-performance cores capable of crunching data at 3.

Qualcomm unveils new PC chip in challenge to Apple, Intel

This is a big deal,” Alondra Nelson, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study who previously served as acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told us. AI will be “as ubiquitous as operating systems in our cellphones,

The White House Is Preparing for an AI-Dominated Future

Sweet Home 3D is among the popular free architecture software. It comes with a vast ... Helping his friends and relatives fix their PC problems is his favorite pastime.

Best free Architecture software for Architects to run on Windows PC

The best PC gaming headsets, such as the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro (wireless) -- our top pick for the best overall PC gaming headset -- can also help you drown out ambient noise in your gaming space and ensure you're heard and can clearly hear what's being said when communicating with your allies (or adversaries) when playing online-based multiplayer games.

Best gaming headsets for PC gamers, according to our in-house gaming experts

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology.

The Download: introducing the Hard Problems issue

Section 174 of the Internal Revenue Code has been around since 1954. It was enacted to eliminate uncertainty in the treatment of research and development (R&D) expenditures and to encourage businesses to carry on research and experimentation.

The Tax Burden on Innovation Just Got Much Heavier and Not Many People Are Talking About It

I'm here to help! I have 10 years of experience in the IT field, and I can provide repairs, maintenance, and setup. Whether you're having trouble with your laptop, desktop, smartphone, or tablet, I can get you back up and running in no time.

Do you need help with your computer or other tech?

A national settlement with the software company Blackbaud for “deficient data-security practices and deficient response to a 2020 ransomware event” shows the company would pay a total of $49.5 ...

Settlement reached with software company Blackbaud after multiple data breaches impact schools, hospitals and nonprofits

The lists recognize the U.S.-based cloud companies – spanning industries including security, cloud storage, financial software, customer experience, data governance, marketing and advertising ...

Cloud Software Investor Battery Ventures Unveils the 25 Highest-Rated Public and 25 Highest-Rated Private Cloud-Computing Companies to Work For

It could be years before Appian, a software company, sees a dollar of the $2 billion judgment it was awarded last year in a corporate espionage case against rival Pegasystems. Still, Appian ...

The Niche Insurance Policy Behind a Software Company’s Big Legal Payout

The Software House

thesoftwarehouse

CSS Houdini and the future of frontend development

In the last few years, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland became true technological powerhouses. However, such success comes with a price: software developer salaries in the Nordics are skyrocketing and it’s getting really hard to find a new employee. This is the reason why more and more companies choose IT outsourcing — but this outsourcing looks quite different than a few years ago… Nordic IT market in 2018/2019 The technological advancement of the Nordic region isn’t something to argue about. In the last edition of the , 4 out of 5 top places were taken by Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. And it’s not only because of the multi-billion dollar companies like Spotify. Small and medium-sized enterprises representing various branches are also investing in new technologies, developing web and mobile apps to enhance their client base. Digital Evolution Index Technological progress results in a significant inflow of capital but, as Daxx puts it, “With more investments fueling the market growth, the demand for software developers will grow.” Countries with the highest level of labour market stress — it’s most difficult to find new employees there (Source: ) Hays Global Skills Index 2017 And it’s already a problem for the Nordic companies. Among all the countries in the , Sweden has the highest level of labour market stress. And Denmark, which was in a slightly better situation year before, is almost catching up now. What does it mean exactly? The biggest problem for both countries is the so-called talent mismatch. To quote the report, “businesses face serious difficulty in matching available talent with unfilled jobs”. Hays Global Skill Index 2017 It’s especially visible on the software development market. that the country will come short of 19,000 IT specialists by 2030 and, according to the Finnish Information Processing Association, Finland will be lacking 15,000 IT engineers by 2020. Of course, it’s good news for the software developers, as they can demand more from their employers, not only in terms of salary but also additional benefits and work-life balance. The rising demands of software engineers can be satisfied by global tech moguls, like Microsoft, IBM and Uber, which are currently expanding in the Nordics. But what about smaller players? Danish government predicts Without the proper workforce, small and medium enterprises won’t be able to scale up their businesses. They can, of course, wait for governments to improve the education system, but it’s a process which will take at least a few years. It’s also possible to create training programmes and, for example, teach immigrants to code. In fact, as informs in its report, some companies, like Integrify, have already started such projects. Unfortunately, this way you can only fill junior-level positions (and it still takes a few months). Daxx All in all, more and more Nordic companies realise that, in the present situation, the best decision is to outsource. Lucky for them, the world of outsourcing has recently changed a lot. Changed for the better. IT outsourcing destinations and trends Of course, Nordic companies are not new to outsourcing. Back in 2015, announced in her article that “Indian outsourcing is booming in the Nordics”. And she was right, as even the biggest enterprises decided to hire remote workers from India — just like the Norwegian DNB bank which sealed a seven-year deal with HCL Technologies. However, the situation has changed since then and in 2017, when writing again about outsourcing in the Nordics, that: Eeva Haaramo from Computer Weekly Haaramo noticed “Although Indian providers remain prominent on the list, their success in the Nordic market showed signs of wavering, with several falling in the rankings.” Why exactly? Because a new opportunity appeared. Nordic companies have recently realised that, instead of employing remote workers from offshore countries like India, they can outsource to their neighbours in Central and Eastern Europe — and this is pretty much the definition of “nearshoring”. Why is it such a hot topic recently? What are the benefits of nearshoring? Many experts talk about geographic proximity: when outsourcing to Poland or Ukraine, you don’t need to google “time difference between…” every other day, as the difference is 1 hour or nothing at all. Other outsourcing experts focus not only on geographical but also on more elusive aspects — according to them, it’s easier to work with people when there are cultural, social and political linkages. List of countries with the best software developers (Source: ) Hacker Rank This is all true, but when it comes to software outsourcing, there are things which matter even more than geographic or cultural proximity. The most important one, which you want to check before starting any collaboration in the IT world, is the technological proficiency of the developers. Fortunately, thanks to the magic of the internet, we can compare IT engineers from various countries. And, according to the extensive report by , developers from CEE are among the very best ones, with Poland securing the 3rd place — outscoring not only India but also United States, Japan and all of the Nordic countries. Hacker Rank However, everyone who has worked in IT for some time knows that high-quality code is not enough. Following the principles of agile software development, you want to contact the remote development team almost on a daily basis. And to do that, you need them to be communicative and to know English very well. It’s especially important for Nordic companies, as Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland are among the very best English-speaking countries in the world, according to the ranking. And this is why Nordic companies want to outsource to Central and Eastern Europe — in the English Proficiency Index ranking, Poland secures the 11th place in the world. Just to compare, India is 27th and China 36th. EF English Proficiency Index The most cost-effective choice All in all, the nearshoring revolution brought IT outsourcing to the next level. 5 or 10 years ago, software companies outsourced their processes when they needed simple, straightforward body leasing. A fairly easy, repetitive job was done by remote workers while the most important lines of code were still written in-house. Nowadays, as Nordic countries experience lack of software engineers on the market, things are different. Simple body leasing is not enough. When outsourcing, modern software companies need complete teams of IT experts which can understand their business and perform the tasks at least as good as the local developers. And it’s nearshoring that seems to satisfy these expectations. But, at this point, we must ask ourselves one more question: what about the money? If the developers in CEE write top-quality code and, at the same time, have very good soft skills, their services must cost a lot, right? When compared to India or China — yes. But for Nordic companies, they are still a bargain. As explained by : “Although Eastern Europe doesn’t offer costs that are as low as those found in India or China, (…) it can argue that it provides better product quality, a proximity to Western Europe, cultural affinity, a better business environment, and high-level skills.” Andrada Fiscutean from ZDNet Let’s talk numbers. Recently, has prepared an up-to-date list of average software developer salaries. In Norway and Denmark, it’s circa $70,000 (or €60,000) per year, in Sweden and in Finland — respectively $53,000 (€45,000) and $47,000 (€40,000). When we look at the data gathered by , the numbers are almost identical. And the conclusion is the same: all four countries are among the highest paying in the world. What about Central and Eastern Europe? Daxx PayScale Average software developer in Poland earns $24,000 (€20,000) per year. Therefore, it’s half the salary of a Finnish developer and one-third of a Norwegian developer’s paycheck. Summary of how average hourly rates, team size and years of experience vary in different regions — among others, in Western and Eastern Europe (Source: ) SourceSeek Makes you think, doesn’t it? However, it’s still only an average salary of a software developer — and you probably aren’t planning to open a new office in Poland anyway soon. When talking about outsourcing, it’s best to focus on the average cost of a software developer in an outsourcing company. Preferably, an average hourly rate — and this is exactly what we can find in the recent report prepared by . An average hourly cost of a software developer in a software house in Eastern Europe is circa $35 (or €30), which is 25% less than in similar companies in Western Europe. And that’s not everything! A typical software company in Eastern Europe was founded in 2010, almost a decade ago, which means one thing: . SourceSeek besides outsourcing itself, you can also get their know-how Finding the best IT outsourcing company With the average number of , as well as the total , being almost the same for all aforementioned countries, you must realise one thing: Nordic companies which decided to outsource to CEE simply did their math. You can get a team of world-class developers and pay for them the fraction of what you used to pay locally. Too good to be true? Well, many people still think so. Some are worried that they will lose . Others don’t believe that outsourcing can be a long-term solution. working hours paid leave control over the remote team But you know what’s the best? That nowadays there’s no use of worrying, as you can check everything on your own. There are independent research companies, like , which gather reviews on software development teams around the world. Do a little research and check out what previous clients think about a certain software house. Find out if they have: good project managers supervising the developers, experience in long-term projects and experience in the technology of your choice. Everything checked? Then open up a new email window and start . It seems that you may be the next entrepreneur wishing to benefit from nearshoring. Clutch writing an enquiry The article was written by Marcin Mazurek and was first published on The Software House Blog . Visit the blog for more articles on software outsourcing tips and best development practices.

The State of Nordic IT Outsourcing

If you’re unsatisfied with the world as it is, you may feel tempted to enhance it. To make it more beautiful. And, in 2018, Google and their ARCore Android can help you achieve that. ARCore is a development platform for building augmented reality apps. In this article, I’ll walk you through its functionalities and how the technology itself can enrich your everyday life. I’ll also show you, step by step, how to make your own ARCore app. What is augmented reality? You could say that augmented reality allows you to create your own world using your mobile phone. In technical terms, AR makes it possible to enhance your real-world environment with computer-generated 3D models, images and videos. When you look at something through your phone’s camera, you see/hear all the virtual additions as a part of the environment. Provided, of course, that you install a required AR app. ? It’s probably because there are so many ways you can use it — the only limit is your imagination. Augmented reality has the potential to impact and enrich all aspects of our lives. Read on to find out how. Why is AR one of the most popular technologies of 2018 What is ARCore Android? Since my article focuses on ARCore, let’s begin with a short trip into the past. On February 23, 2018, Google released ARCore ver. 1.0.0. Since then, Android has been supporting augmented reality. In the first version, Google implemented basic functionalities, like: tracking a phone’s position in the real world, detecting the size and location of environmental planes, as well as understanding the environment’s current lighting conditions. In addition to these features, ARCore 1.0 introduced oriented points which allow you to place virtual objects on non-horizontal or non-planar textured surfaces. On April 17, 2018, Google released ARCore Android ver. 1.1.0, which included: API for synchronously (at the same frame) acquiring the image from a camera frame (without manually copying the image buffer from the GPU to the CPU); API for getting colour correction information for the images captured by the camera. On May 8, we got a huge release, in which Google added: cloud Anchors API that enables developers to build shared Google ARCore experiences across iOS and Android. This is done by allowing anchors created on one device to be transformed into cloud anchors and shared with users on other devices; augmented Images API that enables ARCore apps to detect and track images; vertical plane detection, which means that ARCore started detecting both horizontal and vertical planes. At the time of writing this post, Google has already released ARCore Android ver. 1.3.0, which supports: new method on Frame, _getAndroidSensorPose(), which_returns the world-space pose of the Android sensor frame); new methods on Camera: which returns the camera image’s camera intrinsics and which returns the camera texture’s camera intrinsics; getImageIntrinsics() getTextureIntrinsics() new class that provides the unrotated physical characteristics for a camera, which consists of its focal length, pricinpal point, and image dimensions; CameraIntrinsics new method on Session which returns the config set by Session.configure(). getConfig() ARCore Android in action In the previous section, I wrote about the functionalities of Google ARCore. Now, let’s leave the technical details behind for a while and appreciate just how visually impressive augmented reality is. Are you ready to see how you can incorporate it into your life? Imagine it’s beautiful outside and you’re going on a bike trip to a brand new place. You’ve never been there before, so, of course, you’ll need a guide. With augmented reality, your phone can serve as an excellent guide, showing you where to go based on your location. Here’s one example: Or let’s say you’ve just moved to a big city, but you don’t have any friends there yet, so you don’t know how to get to all the interesting places. If you have an ARCore compatible device, it’ll locate all the points of interest nearby and show them to you real-time. All you need to do is point your phone at the street. ARCore Android can also assist you when you want to decorate your new place or buy a new piece of furniture that doesn’t clash with the rest. Just point your phone where you want to place the new stuff. There’s a lot of ideas and concepts on how to use AR. On this movie there are some examples: How to make an ARCore app In the remaining part of this article, I’ll teach you how to create a simple ARCore app with markers and videos. In ARCore, markers are 2D images in the user’s environment, such as posters or product packaging. In your app, you will use markers to show a 3D model of the Earth and a short video played after the user clicks on the model. This will be the first step to creating something bigger later on, e.g. your own guide for a museum. Let’s get to work! You need to start with the environment configuration. Doing it requires basic knowledge of Android Studio and Kotlin. The next step is configuring your . Remember that the min sdk version for ARCore is 24. In your add dependencies: build.gradle build.gradle, In your , add permissions for the camera: AndroidManifest.xml When you run your application, you have to make sure that you installed it on an ARCore-supported device. There are two ways to do that: use ARFragment — you don’t need to write code to check if ARCore Android is installed on your device; ARFragment will do it for you! write code which will check all ARCore statuses  Here’s an example of the latter: Okay, now that your environment is up and running, you can start building the app. As I mentioned before, it will show you a fraction of ARCore’s power.  I decided to use popular markers (2D images). Inside ARCore Android, they’re called AugmentedImages. First of all, you need to add images which your app will recognise and show as 3D models on your screen. You also need to install a scene plugin for an easy sceneform asset import. This can be done in: id Studio -> Preferences -> Plugins, select Browse repositories… -> Search Google Sceneform Tools, click Install. Now you have everything to start importing 3D models into your project. Time to find some models! You may start with this . Just remember that models should be OBJ, FBX, or glTF. For more information about importing 3D models into your ARCore app, check out this [ website site. ](//developers.google.com/ar/develop/java/sceneform/import-assets)Great! You’ve imported models into our app. Now, let’s have some fun! Create an assets folder inside your project, in your app package. You’ll be saving images for markers and videos there. Remember to use only .jpg and .png image files.  With images and videos in the assets folder plus imported models, you can finally start coding. First of all, you need to create a method for loading an image as a marker, from assets into Bitmap: In my example, I used an image from google samples for ARCore Android, but you can choose any image you want. Now, you need to add a database to store all the images for markers, for the recognition purposes. In order to do that, add: As you can see, you’ve built AugmentedImageDatabase and used the previous method to add an image. After that, it’s time to configure a session: This method should be invoked in onResume() method.  So, you’ve created methods for importing images from assets as well as adding them to the database and session configuration. The only thing left to implement is showing 3D models after the scan marker. Piece of cake! Start by creating an update method, which you’ll use for updating the displayed model: Last step is adding this method in the update listener for the surface view: That’s it! Try scanning the image and you should see a 3D model of the Earth on your screen (or whatever image you chose). Thanks to ARCore, you can see a 3D model of the Earth on a smartphone screen How to add a video in ARCore Android Your ARCore app now allows you to import images and 3D models, add them to the database and show a 3D model after scan marker. But one thing is still missing — showing and playing videos. ARCore doesn’t support playing videos in a straightforward way. To implement it, you need to use OpenGL. I used the code from This is exactly what we want. If you create a class from the gist, the only thing left to do is add some code in your here. MainActivity.class: step 1 — you need to extend GLSurfaceView.Renderer, step 2 — in your layout for MainActivity, add: step 3 — in onCreate method, add: step 4 — add code for drawing frame with a video: final step — add a click listener for your 3D model in the onUpdateFrame method: That’s it! You can find the full code for MainActivity here. After applying all the previous steps, you should get something like that: _Edit description_streamable.com mobizen_20180808_131833 - Streamable Congratulations! You’ve just created an app that can display a 3D model and, after you click on it, shows you a video! It’s amazing what you can do with ARCore Android Summary As you can see, creating a more beautiful world with augmented reality is very simple. Google ARCore gives you the freedom to make almost anything you want. Why almost? The technology is still very young — with amazing potential, but without many features we need. Google developers are gradually adding new features and fixing bugs, but there’s a lot to be done. Still, despite all the bugs and missing features, ARCore Android is worth getting familiar with. At least, that’s what I think. Postscriptum In my project, I’ve used the info from an article titled: . I’ve also used some code from Google ARCore samples. You can find all the code for this project Playing video in ARCore using OpenGL here. The article was written by Łukasz Juszczyk and was first published on The Software House Blog . Visit the blog for more articles on best development practices and software outsourcing tips.

Making the world beautiful with ARCore Android

N ew technologies are evolving rapidly. Some of the newest solutions are gaining popularity every day. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is nothing new, but perfecting it with machine learning may shed a new light on OCR. It’s obviously a broad subject. Nevertheless, I’ll try to briefly introduce you to the machine learning within OCR implementation on Android. I’ll also present some of its functions, basing on an easily available software called Google Firebase ML Kit. What is OCR? Nowadays, almost everything is digital. Books, newspapers, articles — name it. So what can be done to make a written or printed text digitized or even translated? Optical Character Recognition (OCR) comes with the solution. It’s capable of finding the text on the images and making it digital. Whenever you need to split the expenses between you and your friends — it’s always a problem. Who and how much should pay for pizza or drinks? Now, you can take a photo of a receipt and an application on your smartphone can split the expenses for you. It can even send the reminders about the payment to your friends. Also, searching for the information about a bus line may be easier. By taking a photo of a bus number or a name of a bus stop, you can get the information about a bus line you need. How does it work? Computers are dumb themselves and can’t recognize anything from an image. For them, every picture is just a bunch of pixels, basic information about colours. To help the computer find what you need, we can teach it how to recognize the letters. It’s known as a pattern recognition. It can be used for a text that has the same font, size and spacing from the top to the bottom. But what if we have different fonts and sizes throughout the text? To help the computer, detection feature needs to be introduced. Detection feature or intelligent character recognition (ICR) is used to identify characters’ traits. It searches for the letters that meet the specified requirements. For example: if you see two angled lines that meet in a point at the top and there’s a horizontal line between them about halfway down, that’s the letter A. Majority of OCR software uses a detection feature, rather than a pattern recognition, to find the letters on images. Some of them use machine learning to teach the software how to recognize the characteristics of the letters. OCR implementation on Android Google Firebase ML Kit is a set of the tools which helps to implement machine learning on Android and iOS — OCR is one of them. It’s relatively easy to start using machine learning. ML Kit has some built-in modules that enable text recognition, face detection, barcode scanning and more. If you’re experienced in neural networks and want to use more sophisticated or specialized ML, you can use custom Tensorflow models. ML Kit has two versions: on-device and cloud. You’ll find the differences and all the features of both versions . We’ll focus on the Android on-device version below. here Before we start, we need to create the Firebase project in the Firebase Console. Tutorial can be found . It requires the knowledge of Kotlin programming language and RxJava2. here Now, let’s add the Firebase ML Kit module in and gradle dependency. AndroidManifest.xml With this setup we can start implementing our text detector. We need to create . FirebaseVisionTextDetector Now, we have the instance of Vision detector which is used to detect the text on the images. To do that, we use: This method takes instance of as a parameter and produces . When task is ready, we can grab . It contains the data about the detected text and the bounding boxes of the detected areas. FirebaseVisionImage Task<FirebaseVisionText> FirebaseVisionText You can create from a bitmap, using a method below: FirebaseVisionImage There are other factory methods to create FirebaseVisionImage. We can check them in Firebase documentation. For now, we’ll use a bitmap version. Below I’ve implemented the full detector class. I’ve used RxJava2 to process input and output of the text detector. I also wrapped Firebase class in to detect the text on RxJava stream. Task<T> Flowable Full class: TextDetector Important points in the class above are and functions. First one is an input point and the other is an output for our detections which you can listen to. processImage observeDetections Now, we need to draw detections on the scanned image. All the bounding boxes come from the object. FirebaseVisionText contains blocks, lines and elements. Blocks are the largest areas of the text, each block has lines and all the lines have elements. FirebaseVisionText Knowing this, we can draw all these elements on our input bitmap. To do that, we need to gather all the bounding boxes for each unit and then draw rectangles on a bitmap. Below, there’s a complete snippet: Output code will look like this: Blue border represents the block, green represents the line and white represents the element. Pretty much all the text was found. Testing the text recognition on receipts example I decided to test three receipts and check how Google’s text recognition will handle them. Each receipt was in different language: Polish, Spanish and German. I’m unable to test languages different than Latin-based, because on-device version doesn’t support them. To test languages like Greek or Russian, the cloud version is required. The first receipt was in Polish. Below, we can see two images. Text highlighted on the left image shows what have been detected by ML Kit. On the right image there’s a data returned by API, drawn on white background. It seems pretty much the same as on the original image. Of course, there were some issues with formatting. Also some letters weren’t detected or were confused. Besides that, we can see that the results were rather good. I aligned all the lines vertically and adjusted the text size to the boxes, what you can see below. Without these corrections there was much more mess. The second test was performed on the Spanish receipt. This one was in low resolution (225 x 335px). As we can see, detector found only two blocks on the entire image. And the last attempt was on the Swiss receipt in German. Detection was almost faultless. Whole text was found, except “e-mail” at the bottom of the receipt. Detector only found last letter of “email” word and assumed it’s 1 (number one). Summary I’ve presented you the overview of OCR basics. I also showed the OCR implementation on Android using Google’s ML Kit. Implementation of ML Kit is rather simple and doesn’t need that much coding. When using an on-device version, detection is limited to the Latin-based languages. Scanned images must have a decent resolution to get good results. Detector doesn’t recognize some of the letters or confuses them. Also, there are some problems with the text written vertically. To get better results, cloud version, other specialized OCR software or custom Tensorflow model are required. On-device text recognition can be used to detect keywords or some simple information from larger text rather than extended articles. As I’ve mentioned earlier, OCR is nothing new at all. But introduction of machine learning within this technology may significantly improve it. In the nearest future we may witness extended, smart OCR implementation, version 2.0. Who knows? The article was written by Łukasz Gawron and was first published on The Software House Blog . Visit the blog for more articles on best development practices and software outsourcing tips.

Simple OCR implementation on Android with Google’s ML Kit

Is it possible to create a useful API in the course of a day or two? That’s exactly what the authors of the new framework called API Platform promise to us. However, you probably wonder if it’s really worthwhile to spend time getting to know yet another tool. Well, it depends. One of the most important challenges in the software development is to “not reinvent the wheel”. That’s why, from the beginning of the history of coding, developers have tried to create solutions that’d speed up their work by automating the most repetitive processes. However, selecting tools that’ll really meet your requirements is almost always a painful procedure. Among the most promising frameworks/tools that have shown up in the PHP world recently is API Platform. In my work, I often consult solutions with my clients — who usually are CTOs as myself. And now, more and more often, I get questions about API Platform. Is it really a useful framework or just some temporary hype? We’ve used API Platform in The Software House in a dozen of projects now, therefore, I feel like I already have enough experience to share with you some of our thoughts. OK, what’s that? API Platform was created in 2015 by a Symfony expert, Kévin Dunglas. It was claimed to be one of the most important development events on SymfonyCon in Paris, alongside Platform.sh and Blackfire.io. Among those three, I think API Platform was the most successful one. While the first version had indeed some annoying mechanisms, the framework was greatly enhanced in version 2. But let’s start from the beginning: what does it actually do? In short, it’s a tool based on the PHP Symfony framework which helps you speed up building the backend part of your project. Especially in the beginning of the development process (but sometimes on later stages as well), we have to put the same code over and over again without any or with some little changes, for example when implementing the paging mechanism or an authorisation system. It doesn’t matter if you’re creating an app for a bookshop or for a car renting company — for sure there’ll be a list of some items, a place where you can add an item, edit it and, of course, delete it. Mechanisms which allow you to speed up the development of those parts are called CRUD or boilerplate. And there are lots of them on the market. You’ve probably already used Admin Generator for Symfony 1 or Scaffolding for Ruby on Rails. What’s new in API Platform is that times have changed and now we’re facing a completely different approach to architecture. All the previous solutions were creating monolith codes where backend and frontend were created on the server side. Now, we tend to implement more service-oriented architecture with a backend API that serves the data and a couple of clients consuming it — for example frontend SPA applications or mobile apps. API Platform focuses only on API, leaving the presentation layer to others. What exactly does API Platform give us from the beginning? Here’s the list of my favourites: — JSON, XML, CSV, whatever you need. You can also change the format with one simple alteration in a configuration file. All methods serve POST, PUT, GET and DELETE options. A ready-to-use API based on REST with a variety of formats to choose , using one of the most popular PHP frameworks now — Symfony. The API is built securely on the best programming practices and shipped with a caching mechanism (Varnish). It’s already optimised (we all know how much developers hate to write any docs, leave alone supporting them in a long term). Plus a fancy mini-console to run simple queries and play around with the examples. There’s an automatically-generated documentation . This stuff can be enabled with just a few lines of code. You don’t have to worry about things like filters, paging mechanisms or error messages If I was about to present estimation for building from scratch an API which, for example, handles about 3 database entities (let’s say, we have a school with classes, teachers and students and need to build a really simple CRM) with some authorisation, filters, paging and documentation, I’d say it’d took about 2–3 weeks to implement. With API Platform we can prepare it in one day. OK, I know what you’re thinking at this moment: RAD is only good at the beginning, as when you go deeper, there are always problems. Isn’t it the same here? Yes — that’s also true in this situation. After the basic setup, things tend to be a little more complicated than in the tutorial on the API Platform’s website (BTW: a very good tutorial). After you create a database as you like and configure all the relations, you’ll probably need some custom fields or some custom business logic for your API. You start to look for the code and it occurs that there isn’t any! You have to do everything via the special filters or create customised controllers. And both solutions require pretty good knowledge of Symfony — the framework on which everything’s built here (I’ll get back to it later). API Platform’s documentation used to be one of its biggest flaws but now it’s updated and very useful Is this for basic projects or rather for advanced ones? Actually, it’s for both — the main problem is the gap in between. If you’re a beginner and just want to create a very simple API, you can for sure use this tool but please do not expect that you’ll be able to customise it exactly as you wish. I’ve also seen frontend developers who wanted to specialise their app on frontend side using one of the modern SPA frameworks (like Angular or React for example) but still needed a simple API that’ll deliver them some backend data — API Platform worked very well for them. The same situation is with mobile apps. I know that right now there are similar solutions just delivering you simple backend service in the cloud, like Firebase, but for me it’s still easier and faster to run API Platform on my server than to configure it all using some cloud panel. It also gives me more flexibility. If you just follow the tutorial and change the sample database names to your own, you should really get your app within one day tops. It’s also available as a Docker container, but my advice is to not use it if you haven’t had anything in common with Docker before — you’ll just get frustrated at the beginning and lose lots of precious time and nerves. Installing it via composer (the second installation method in the tutorial) is, in my opinion, way more intuitive. But what if I want to create a more complicated app? Yes, you can create almost everything you want. But only under one condition — before you begin, you have to really know Symfony first. This is the biggest advantage and the biggest flaw of this solution — it’s all standing on top of another framework. Furthermore, as I’ve mentioned above, API Platform isn’t generating a CRUD code that you can just modify as you wish. I’ve used such code-generating solutions and they were very good at the beginning (you can just get some code and modify it easily without reading any further instructions) but there were certain issues with that: . Sometimes even despite following very good programming practices. If you’re not an experienced developer, it becomes very messy soon . You cannot generate it again for some database changes. There are some solutions which allow that but you need to cope with pretty confusing overriding mechanisms. After modifying any part of the pre-generated code, there’s no turning back API Platform isn’t generating any code ­–­­­ it creates the content “on the fly”. It’s not really a new solution, as I remember similar tools being available years ago (even API Platform’s predecessor, Admin Panel from Symfony 1) but the problem with these older mechanisms was that usually you had very low flexibility on what you could create — limited to what the author allowed you to do. Here the things are a little different, as API Platform is built following the “Symfony way” of how things should work, meaning it’s based on event-driven mechanisms. How deeply should I know Symfony before using API Platform? As I wrote above, if you really need to do advanced things in API Platform, you need to know Symfony first. If you’ve created a couple of Symfony-based apps before and you love it, API Platform will be a perfect enhancement for you. If not, you should first focus on understanding how Symfony works. Here are the three most important things to learn: — That’s basically the first and most important part of Symfony you really need to get to know. You can find the documentation here: . The only way you can modify anything within the API is if you hook into one of the events. To do it properly and avoid situations when you’re asking yourself “Why this @#$ isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do?”, you really need to know how events are working in Symfony and which events API Platform is using. EventStack //symfony.com/doc/current/components/http_kernel.html — All the data that’s transferred via API goes through a serialisation component built in Symfony. You can find the documentation here: . If you’re wondering why the given field or structure isn’t displayed in the GET method, the issue probably lays in the serialisation. Serializer //symfony.com/doc/current/components/serializer.html — You may have met this pattern in other modern frameworks. The general idea is that all the things should be independent of each other and then just bonded together at the final stage by “injecting one to another” — it improves the sustainability of the code and is a must-have in modern apps right now. Here’s the description of how Symfony handles that: . As you might suspect, API Platform is also injecting its code to other services and can also benefit from services that you wish to inject. Dependency Injection //symfony.com/doc/current/components/dependency_injection.html There’s also one more thing that some PHP developers might not be familiar with — annotations. Annotations first started to be a popular solution in Java and soon migrated to other platforms, including PHP. The basic concept is that you define how the class or method should behave by commenting it in a proper way on top of it. Some frameworks use annotations so much, that in many cases the comment before the method name contains more data and instructions than the code itself — API Platform is definitely one of them. I call such approach “annotation programming”. It can be very useful and descriptive but if you haven’t been familiar with such things before, you’ll need to get used to it now. Here’ a link for further reading: . Of course, you can still use XML or YAML but I strongly recommend to get to know annotations, as it seems that they’re the future of programming. //php-annotations.readthedocs.io/en/latest/UsingAnnotations.html This is a pretty big threshold to cross. Is it worth it? If you know Symfony very well, along with API Platform you have a very powerful tool in hand. Creating APIs will be much more simple and cost-effective, everything based on a foundation of a very solid framework which is Symfony. But what if you’re not so familiar with the solutions I’ve mentioned above? Learning all of this stuff requires a lot of time and practice. In return, you just receive an ability to speed up the process of creating the most common element of the API. However, in my opinion, it’s worth it. You’ll have to learn most of those components anyway if you’re planning to create a long-term project — if not in this framework, they’ll still appear in other. Although at first this solution might be very hard to implement (you might be frustrated that the things aren’t working as you expected), there’s a good reason why it works this way, as it prevents developer from making a mess in the code which was one of the biggest problems in PHP some time ago. API Platform’s pet spider showing his love for other frameworks — especially Symfony It seems like you’re defending API Platform. Does it have any flaws? Like all frameworks, API Platform also has some annoying issues that you just have to cope with. For me, the most important one is that you often cannot directly find help for the issue you’re dealing with on the internet. If you just type “API Platform <the problem you have>” in Google, you probably won’t find any solution and might be under impression that the community is very small. That’s because 90% of questions regarding API Platform are in fact questions about Symfony itself. Those questions are answered by the Symfony community — which, lucky for us, is a pretty big one. Therefore, in order to find your answer, you should rather search Symfony forums than the API Platform ones. This, of course, means that you have to ask the right questions and (again) know Symfony quite well. You can also get help by asking on GitHub — very often from Kévin Dunglas (the creator of API Platform) himself. Second thing is the naming convention. Like any other CRUD solution, API Platform has to generate some names of classes and methods on its own. Usually, those names reflect the names used in the database but you still have to guess how the particular method or filter has been named. For example, when working with API Platform in The Software House, we had a table named “Language Spoken” and we got a method for retrieving all languages that users speak. There was a lot of confusion about the auto-generated name: will it be “getLanguagesSpoken” or “getLanguageSpokens” or maybe something else? We finally got a debugger tool from Symfony (which I also suggest you should do) to see the call stack and found out what the generated name was in fact. As other CRUD solutions which I’ve seen on the market, API Platform also has issues with virtual fields. Basically, the concept of such automated tools is that we have some database and that’s the main source of all the data and structure. However, sometimes we need to return values that are not directly stored in the database but just calculated based on some business logic (or, for example, fetched from some 3rd party source). In these cases, you can still add such fields to the API but they won’t be 100% supported and you may expect some issues with that. For example, sorting is by default executed as the database query, so for a virtual field, you cannot add sorting easily (even if you implement some functions providing sorting rules). It’s also worth mentioning that although you can use any output provided by API Platform in your other Symfony bundles, it is very complicated to make API Platform use any other bundles and make API out of them. For example, if you’re using SonataAdminBundle or Sylius (which are very popular solutions in Symfony) you cannot count on API Platform to create API from the code provided there. Summary I grew up in the gaming community where there’s the saying that good games are “easy to learn and hard to master” — I think this sentence also describes API Platform. If you just want to quickly create a very simple API, this tool will be very suitable for you. If you want something more — it’s also possible but, unless you’re a Symfony expert, you’ll need some time and practice to achieve it. Although I always approach fresh projects with reserve (API Platform is just 2 years old now, which for me is a very short period of time), I think this framework is a very promising solution. By releasing the second version about half a year ago, the guys from the core team have really shown that they were able to fix their own mistakes and were listening to the community. Most of the annoying problems from the first version were solved, for example, now there’s a possibility to use subresources from parent resource instead of creating two separate API endpoints for that. It’s a sign that the framework is going in a good direction. To be honest, I’ve also wanted to write something about gaps in the documentation. We were even planning to release our internal subsidiary document explaining differences between documentation on their site and the real code situation. But, meanwhile, the documentation has been updated — which also shows that the framework is still evolving and we might expect even better versions in the future. The article was written by Marek Gajda and was first published on The Software House Blog . Visit the blog for more articles on best development practices and software outsourcing tips.

Practical guide to API Platform: How to tell if it’s the right framework for you

W hen you work on a project, sooner or later you’ll have to present your results to the client. It goes without saying that you’ll be updating files, services or schemas in the database, which means only one thing — deployment time! For many programmers, this process can be stressful. There are times when the service is down, the database falls apart, or a migration goes wrong. Clients don’t make our lives easier either. They would like the deploy to run problem-free and take as little time as possible. Ideally, it should run unnoticed by users. Unfortunately, the conditions may vary, and the deployment of subsequent versions can take quite a long time. It can also cause a temporary downtime for the users. In such cases, we can always ask the DevOps team for help. However, they are usually very busy and can’t guarantee to rebuild the whole deployment process on the spot. However, we can introduce a few changes to the project to shorten the deploy time as well as the application downtime. Below are some concepts and solutions that every developer should be able to smoothly adopt for their project. Back in time — deployment then and now It’s almost certain that a vast majority of programmers remember the beginnings of their careers and their first deploys. When we worked on a small project ourselves, we created an application entirely on our machine. We attached or built libraries, downloaded various types of resources (images, fonts, styles) and sent the ready application to the server using an FTP client. So, most of the preparations were performed locally. With the technology development and new standards creation, the way projects are deployed also changed. Now, in most cases, the developer logs in remotely on the production/test server, downloads the current version of the project from the repository and then launches the application building process. The result is a complete application with the necessary dependencies. It’s clear that the whole process has been moved to a remote machine, which allows us to automate the process and promotes easier management. Faster frontend deployment using building tools Building a frontend application most often looks as follows: Clean a folder with the current application build Run the bundling task Remove unused code Translate the application so that it can work on various browsers Load environmental variables Compress and minify the code to obtain the smallest possible files Copy additional assets Done! The time needed to build an entire application poses a significant problem. For a large project, you can count it in minutes. Since you clean the folder with the current build (you want to get rid of old and unnecessary files), users lose access to your application. In order to avoid this, you can build the application in a folder different than the one served to clients and move the files there at the very end. This solution reduces the time when the application is unavailable to clients, but it has two significant problems: The files are duplicated. When you want to return to the previous version, you lose the data. Instead of copying the files, you can create symbolic links and keep the next builds in separate folders with tags or timestamps. Example task with linking If necessary, a rollback to a previous build will only require linking files from another folder. The last thing to remember is that the symbolic links must be relative, and the build folder should also be available on the server. Path example To avoid problems with the browser’s cache, it’s also advisable to have a random hash assigned to the files. Backend deployment HAProxy For quite a long time, all applications in TSH have been based on the Docker containerization. It increases the flexibility of the project by allowing us to change various elements of our applications easily. However, in order to replace some elements in a way that is invisible to users, you need to extend your architecture with a load balancer. In our case, the balancer will redirect traffic between old and updated containers. HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) will suit our needs perfectly. Setup is as easy as just adding a few lines to our docker compose file. API update To a large degree, backend actualization comes down to building a new container for the current API version and redirecting all traffic from one container to another. With HAProxy, the whole process becomes virtually seamless. Still, let’s systematize our knowledge in this area. On the server, you have launched the API v1 version connected to LB (load balancer — here: HAProxy). You build an API container and add it to the already-launched containers. To do this, you have to use the command, and the HAProxy itself will add it to the configuration and redirect traffic to it (by default, the traffic is distributed evenly over all containers in the configuration). v2 docker-compose scale api=2 Now, the only thing left to do is to remove the v1 version and redirect all traffic to v2. Unfortunately, changing the API scaling to 1 will remove the container that was added last — i.e., your current API version. You must, therefore, remember to stop and remove the old container before you change the scale. This problem can be solved with a simple bash script. deploy.sh After the script has been executed, only the api v2 container will stay active, with all traffic directed to it. Database The last element to be discussed here is the database. Depending on what you want to change, it may be one of the simplest or most challenging element of the system. To ensure that this procedure will run without any problems some simple concepts are presented below. Also, it is worth mentioning that you should modify the API gradually, alternating with the database. Adding a new column Create a migration to add a new column. Deploy the code with the migration. Upload new the API version that is using the new column. Removing a column Modify the code not to use the selected column. Prepare a migration for obsolete column adding a meaningful suffix, such as _deprecated: If the new functionality works and you’re sure you will no longer need the data, you can delete the column. If you come across a problem, you can rollback database easily by removing the suffix. Changing a column name Prepare a migration that creates a column with a new name. Add an event that ensures the updated data is copied to the newly-created column. Migrate the data from the old column to the new one (it’s best to divide records into parts). Modify the code to use only the new column. Remove the old column (see the example above). Changing a column type Create a migration that contains a new column of a different type. Add a suffix with the column type to the name so that it’s easier to distinguish between them . name_column_type Add an event that ensures the updated data is copied to the newly-created column. Migrate the data from the old column to the new one. In the model, enter the name of the new column type. (Compatibility is important here so lets make our model “smart”. If you don’t find the column , use the original column name. In the Doctrine the columns can be obtained using Schema-Manager). name_column_type Create a migration that adds the suffix to the original column and remove the type suffix from the new one. _deprecated Remove column name guessing logic from the model. Remove the old column (see the example above). Looking at the examples above, you can see that well-thought-out migrations allow us to update/modify the database in a way virtually invisible to users. In the end In conclusion, a relatively small amount of work can significantly shorten your deploy time. Of course, the process requires some preparation, caution, and discipline in its implementation. But, in the end, it equals less stress and more satisfied clients. Also worth reading: Bastien Libersa on his blog Slava Korolev on Medium The article was written by Paweł Rychlewski and was first published on The Software House Blog . Visit the blog for more articles on best development practices and software outsourcing tips.

Poor man’s zero downtime deployment

M any PHP developers are green with envy when thinking about their colleagues who use Node. Asynchronous Node systems are sharing the codebase between protocols and serving them right out of the code. This really makes one wonder about switching to Node. Well, actually something resembling Node in PHP has been added as an extension. And it’s called Swoole. Node in PHP? What is that Swoole thing? Well, let me copy-paste the definition straight from the : documentation “Production-Grade Async programming Framework for PHP Enable PHP developers to write high-performance, scalable, concurrent TCP, UDP, Unix socket, HTTP, Websocket services in PHP programming language without too much knowledge about non-blocking I/O programming and low-level Linux kernel”. Swoole works as an extension to PHP and it’s written in C. Sounds promising, right? Hosting HTTP server with PHP? Websockets in PHP itself? Many other possibilities, some looking exotic? And all this with keeping high performance. Let’s check it out! How to get it running? Installation methods on native platforms vary. For Linux it boils down to one pecl command: pecl install swoole For MacOS, brew can be used: brew install swoolebrew install homebrew/php/php72-swoole And on Windows, native installation is not possible, but we should use Docker anyway. Dockerizing Swoole Of course, the best idea to run the PHP and Swoole is the Docker container. Let’s see how to create a container which will allow us to use Swoole. First, we need a Dockerfile. FROM php:latestRUN pecl install swooleADD php.ini /usr/local/etc/phpRUN usermod -u 1000 www-data That was pretty straightforward. After extending the official PHP Docker image, installing Swoole with pecl, and copying php.ini — we got it. The last line is a standard Docker fix for MacOS. When it comes to php.ini config file which is copied, it’s even simpler — requires only one line: extension=swoole.so What does it offer? Swoole has variety of functionalities. Most of them are asynchronous. Here are some of the most interesting ones (other can be found at Swoole ): documentation TCP/UDP server and client, HTTP server and client, Websocket server and client, Redis protocol server and client, MySQL client, Atomics, Filesystem. Let’s see how to use three of them: HTTP server, Websocket server and Filesystem. These are the most important ones in my opinion. HTTP Server using Swoole Swoole allows us to run a simple HTTP server which works asynchronously. Here’s the simple code that will also use asynchronous filesystem access to respond with index.html file to every request it handles. As we can see, it looks a bit like Node. First, we create the object that resembles the HTTP server. Then, we bind two anonymous functions for two events: one for , which will be executed when the server is started, and another for , which will be executed for every request. It takes a request and responses objects as parameters**.** swoole_http_server start request contains all the data related to the request itself: requested path, headers, and so on. On the other hand, it’s used to provide output, set headers etc. It’s worth mentioning that these two objects are not PSR conformant, but rather they are custom Swoole objects. Request object In the , asynchronous file system is used to load the data from a file. Once the data is available, a callback is fired with the content loaded. Then, this content is used to fill the response object and close the response. This sends the data back to the browser effectively. request event That looks neat and most of all — works. But what about the performance? HTTP Server benchmark To test the performance of HTTP server using Swoole, I’ve created an app in Node — which can do exactly the same thing as the one in Swoole — and also a NGINX server which serves index.html as a static file. All dockerized in 3 separate containers. Then, I used tool to hit these containers hard. Results were astounding. wrk Swoole results were way better than expected! That came as a surprise. I didn’t expect Swoole to overtake NGINX, but it actually did! Node was outdistanced. Raw power of this extension is really impressive, but it fades away with more work being done in the request. Unfortunately, Swoole has two little drawbacks that make these raw benchmarks irrelevant. We will get to them later. Websocket Server using Swoole As mentioned before, Swoole offers a method to create websocket server. It works asynchronously, follows the same methodology as HTTP and other Swoole functionalities. In my opinion, it’s one of the most important Swoole parts. Come on, websockets in PHP? I’m in. Let’s see how it looks. Looks similar to HTTP server example. First, we create the object which resembles the websocket server. Then, we bind 4 anonymous functions to 4 events. One to event, which will work just like start event from HTTP server. Another to event which will be executed once a new websocket connects. Yet another to event which will be executed when a websocket sends a message to the server. And finally — to event which runs when a websocket disconnects. swoole_websocket_server start open message close Websockets connected to the server are identified by the unique ID that increments with each of the new websockets. Problems encountered whilst using Swoole It all worked well so far, but there were two problems I’ve encountered during the tests of some solutions using Swoole. These were: no real HTTPS support in HTTP server, no support for global variables in scripts. First one is easy to mitigate. We just need to set up a reverse proxy using NGINX or any load balancer and it’s done. But by doing that, we lose extreme performance boost that Swoole offers. Second one is more tricky. Swoole spawns worker processes for handling requests which means that if we create a global variable, its value is independent between threads and it can’t work. Here’s an example showing this behaviour. One would expect the response would return 0, then 1, 2, 3 and so on, but instead it always returns 0. I reached to the Swoole authors to check if it’s a bug, but it isn’t. In order to get the behaviour we expect, we can set in configuration, but this decreases the performance. worker_num = 1 Conclusion Swoole, as everything, has its bright sides and dark corners. I think it’s still a good idea to bring asynchronous programming to PHP. It can be used in various cases, ranging from fast prototyping, by concise single responsibility microservices, low-latency game servers and ending with being a backend server for big frameworks. Promising indeed. The article was written by Adrian Chlubek and was first published on The Software House Blog . Visit the blog for more articles on best development practices and software outsourcing tips.

Swoole: Is it Node in PHP or am I wrong?

If you’re just starting out with hybrid mobile apps, you might feel a bit lost. Online definitions can be ambiguous and guides will often lack updated information. That’s why, in this article, we’ll do our best to help you understand what hybrid mobile apps are, and what solutions are worth your attention in mid-2018. So, you’ve decided to build a mobile application. You’ve done some research and contacted dozens of companies that specialize in creating native apps. Then, you got dozens of estimates with random numbers on them. Unsatisfied with the results, you shifted your attention to non-native solutions. But, a couple of weeks later, after hours spent online, you don’t feel any wiser. Words like “hybrid”, “cross-platform” and “a mobile web app” are swirling around in your head. Most of the articles promised the earth, but they quite often present contradictory theories, which exacerbates the situation and makes you chase your own tail. Hybrid, cross-platform, React Native, Xamarin… ??? In order to learn the basics of hybrid mobile app development, let’s start at the very beginning. Definitions Cross-platform By definition, cross-platform software works with many platforms. This can be a single code base running on various OS with no special preparations (like Java). It might also be the same app — with the same business logic, the same branding etc. — but written as two separate native apps, one for iOS and one for Android. All in all, “cross-platform” is a very ambiguous term. Hybrid Hybrid mobile apps (or simply, “hybrids”) are a subset of cross-platform software, and they have no clear definition. Traditional hybrids are web applications wrapped in a sort of a native container. Developers build a kind of a single-page website, make it mobile-friendly, and put it into that container. Finally, they connect it to some smartphone/tablet hardware. Voila! A web app pretending to be a mobile one is born, with one code for every platform. The container (the wrapping) comes with a framework of choice (such as Apache Cordova, Ionic, etc.). Modern hybrids are different. They are not web apps, but actual mobile applications, written in JavaScript and translated into a set of native instructions — during runtime. Seems nice, doesn’t it? But what are the options? Frameworks and languages Here are the available hybrid app development tools: is a set of tools (framework) in which developers code using C# and .NET Xamarin is a framework in which developers build products using JavaScript and React React Native is a framework in which developers build code in JavaScript and Angular NativeScript are frameworks in which developers use HTML, CSS and JavaScript Cordova/PhoneGap/Ionic What’s on the market Business-wise, software must work, as well as be user-friendly and future-proof. Technology plays a second role. However, some technology choices have business consequences. Below, we’ve listed a couple of major decisions you can make when it comes to hybrid mobile apps. Websites & progressive web apps (PWA) Today’s websites are no longer just static content with a bunch of forms and links. Contemporary web apps compete with desktop and mobile software in fields of UX and functionality. And yet, not everything works the same way on a mobile phone. When it comes to working in the background, Bluetooth, battery information or iOS FaceID, web apps are a no-go. A progressive web app (PWA) is a new concept which, to some extent, combines web and native approaches. It’s a web application that can work offline to some degree, with an icon visible on the home screen. Its limitations, however, stay the same. The app’s behaviour and capabilities depend heavily on the platform. It’s an interesting concept that can evolve and improve, but, first, it needs time to mature (iOS has just started supporting PWAs as of version 11.3). You need to remember that PWA is nothing more but a website with push notifications pretending to be a mobile app (source: easternpeak.com ) Traditional (web) hybrids For years, traditional hybrids have been the first choice for a quick MVP or very simple products. There are many tools to choose from: the most popular Apache Cordova, its cousin PhoneGap, Angular-based Ionic, and more. The pros of this approach are: a single code base plus a lower cost of development and maintenance. What’s more, such a product can have a web version out of the box. The cons are less obvious and not everybody talks about them point-blank. But, the truth is, you can’t 100% mimic native apps with traditional hybrid mobile apps, no matter what their creators say. You’ll experience worse performance, inferior UX, and a narrow set of ready-to-use features to implement. There will be myriads of little things working noticeably strange or slower. Even if you’re not able to put your finger on it, the app will always seem a bit off. Fortunately, the supremacy of traditional hybrids has ended, as the recent months brought us superior alternatives. At least, that’s what we think. Xamarin With Xamarin, you can build native apps for many platforms. It allows C# and .NET developers to create native apps for Android, iOS and Windows. There are 2 ways of doing it in Xamarin. The first one is Xamarin Forms, which creates a single code base which is shared among the platforms with almost no changes. But there’s a cost: Xamarin.Forms is good for building simple MVPs, rapid prototyping or very, very simple apps. Even Xamarin states in its documentation files: Xamarin.Forms allows for rapid prototyping of applications that can evolve over time to complex applications. So, using Xamarin.Forms for more demanding projects might be difficult. For complex hybrid mobile app development, there’s the Xamarin Native approach. Using Xamarin Native**,** you get the look and feel of a native app, plus you can work with only one technology (C# and .NET). It means you can have just one team of developers to pay. Drawbacks? There’s no longer a single code base, so you end up with two separate projects to create and maintain — one for each platform. Only portions of the code base can be shared (like business logic or communication services). UI implementations must remain separate. If you have .NET developers, Xamarin Native is a great tool as you can assign available resources to mobile development. It’ll also work on Windows, perform well and provide good users experience. In conclusion, it’s better than traditional hybrids. So what’s the cost? Time. Mobile apps created with Xamarin Native will take more time to develop compared to a traditional. React Native Facebook has created React Native (RN) for JavaScript (JS) developers. Using RN, you can build iOS and Android mobile apps in React (JS library for building user interfaces). Smart move, as React is very popular and battle-tested. If this sounds like a traditional hybrid description, JS is the only link here. In RN, you don’t build websites inside a native wrapper. You develop native applications in JavaScript (technically, React and a markup HTML-like language). RN translates the code into instructions for both iOS and Android. So, you “speak” React/JavaScript, and RN translates it on the fly. This way, mobile devices can easily display e.g. an Android-specific button. This is a modern hybrid — one code for all operating systems. This results in a better user experience and the feeling of a native app. Hybrid mobile apps made with RN run more smoothly, and the user is quite often unable to tell the difference (unlike with traditional hybrids). Disadvantages? Some platform-specific functionalities might be difficult to achieve. Not everything available for native apps is provided off-the-shelf by RN. On the other hand, developers can add a piece of native code for missing extensions, or use one of the thousands built by the RN community. RN is used even by big players, like Microsoft or Wix, which contributes to the community’s impressive size. In the end, RN hybrid mobile apps can’t compete with native ones in some aspects. But, usually, the final effect is more than satisfactory. The framework is a huge improvement over traditional hybrids in terms of both user experience and performance. At The Software House, we believe that it offers good value for money. NativeScript NativeScript is a hybrid mobile app framework similar to RN but based on Angular (another JS framework). It tackles the hybrid problem like RN does — by using native components and classes based on your JavaScript code. There’s a bunch of ready-to-use multi-platform components available inside the framework and, just like with RN, it’s possible to extend it when needed. If you have a team of JS developers who are experienced with Angular, NativeScript is definitely something to consider. Just keep in mind that, as for now, it has a significantly smaller community in comparison with RN. This equals fewer ready-to-use plugins and libraries. Xamarin Vs. React Native With NativeScript yet to grow and mobile web apps lagging behind, in August 2018, Xamarin and React Native seem to be the main players in the field of hybrid mobile app development. At least, that’s what we think. Let us now compare those two. A comparison of React Native and Xamarin web searches from the last 30 months. As you can see, React Native took the lead approximately 1 year ago (source: Google Trends). Code Base There’s one code base in , fully shared between platforms. As a result, there’s rarely any platform- specific code needed. This generates certain limitations, but, at the same time, significantly reduces the development time and cost. To achieve a more native approach, developers share only portions of their code. UI is built separately for each platform. This generates a more native feel of the Xamarin UI, but also results in longer development. RN Xamarin Supported platforms Right now, supports iOS and Android, covering more than 90% of mobile devices in the world. supports both iOS and Android, plus Universal Windows Platform and macOS. Choose Xamarin if these platforms are critical to your business. RN Xamarin Resources required For , you’ll most likely need frontend developers experienced in React, but any JavaScript developer should handle the task as well. To code hybrid mobile apps in , you’ll probably want to find experienced .NET developers. RN Xamarin App updates and bug fixes executes JS code during runtime. It means that you can improve your app and fix bugs without updating the app in the store — some clients may not even notice the updates happening. precompiles the code for each platform during the build, therefore, no dynamic updates are possible. When you want to introduce bug fixes, you’ll have to update the app in the store every time. RN Xamarin Use cases is suitable for: RN Apps requiring few platform-specific functionalities and component o Apps that are not too complex and don’t require native UI Rewriting your old traditional hybrid Apps with a lot of custom design, but with native UX is the way to go when: Xamarin You or your affiliated company has a team of .NET developers Access to complex, platform-specific functionalities is needed You need to use native components for each platform, making the UI indistinguishable from the traditional native app UI You target the Windows platform Summary When it comes to hybrid mobile app development, everybody praises their own technology — keep that in mind. What’s more, when you’re searching for more information, you should always look at the timestamp — in the mobile world, a few months is like a century, so a two-year-old article might misinform you a lot. There are various cross-platform technologies on the market, but few of them are both mature and future-proof. Traditional hybrids are out of the picture — they’re already past their prime. In contrast, both Xamarin and React Native present powerful means of building hybrid mobile apps. At The Software House, we use React Native, as we have a strong React team. Ultimately, the choice depends on your preferred resources and the business purpose of the app. So, finally, when looking for a team to develop your cross-platform app, just keep in mind these few points present above and you’ll be fine. The article was written by Kamil Płaczek and Tomasz Mróz, and was first published on The Software House Blog . Visit the blog for more articles on best development practices and software outsourcing tips.

Stories, News & Mentions about THESOFTWAREHOUSE

Thesoftwarehouse’s Stories on HackerNoon

Thesoftwarehouse's News & Mentions