Ruby on Rails

Suitability Of Ruby on Rails To Develop SaaS-based System

Introduction

Ever since the onset of the pandemic, most companies are letting their employees work from home. It has become the New Normal now. Nevertheless, working from home can lead to many complications, especially for those who work as software developers, requiring specialized systems and hardware infrastructure to operate.

Pain points like outdated native applications on the laptop and lack of local storage for updates can impact daily productivity. Here, using a SaaS platform is exceptionally convenient. It eliminates the need for local resources and brings cost-efficiency through a pay-per-use model.

Thanks to their myriad business benefits, more and more organization are adopting SaaS tools. According to an industry report, in 2019, Software as a Service generated a grand revenue of 148.5 billion USD. These figures account for two-thirds of the revenue generated from the entire public cloud services market. By the end of this year, the SaaS revenue is projected to skyrocket and reach around 190 billion USD. It is slated to reach 305 Billion USD by as early as 2025.

Application and web development on SaaS platforms permit various languages and frameworks, including React.JS, Django, Ruby on Rails (RoR). The following article will discuss why Ruby on Rails has the most suitability with SaaS-based systems.

However, before we get into RoR, let us first understand a bit about SaaS-based systems.


Overview Of SaaS-Based Systems

SaaS is a cloud-based solution in which the SaaS service provider hosts all the applications and relevant data via the internet. The customers do not have to spend their time and resources developing on-premise management software; instead, they can rent these services from the SaaS service provider and pay per their requirements. SaaS-based systems run exclusively on the server of the service provider, who handles the maintenance workloads.


Benefits Of Using SaaS

• It allows the high availability of the application across multiple devices such as laptops, desktops, and mobile phones, permitting seamless remote working

• The pay-per-use model allows customers to drive cost-leadership

• With SaaS, much of the delivery workload for an application to run it seamlessly across environments reduces. The SaaS service provider gives access to enterprise applications such as cloud ERP, CRM, and many more

• The SaaS model lowers the time-to-market for the application and also its development and maintenance costs.


What Is Ruby On Rails?

Ruby is a general-purpose programming language for web development. The syntax of the language is straightforward, and its simplicity is often compared to Python, another programming language known for its lucidity. However, despite such perks, building a SaaS-based application on Ruby is a tiresome job. That is why separate tools and frameworks were developed to resolve the issue. It is where Rail comes into the picture.

Rails is a framework which helps create web applications, using Ruby as its core programming language. Ruby On Rails (RoR) is a software platform that makes web development much more manageable. It is an open-source platform created by David Heinemeier Hansson.

Ruby on Rails combines Ruby with other programming languages like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS for creating web applications that can operate on a web server. Most of the time, Ruby on Rails is classified as a server-side web application development platform.

The developers opt for Ruby on Rails because of its compact nature and easy to code programming interface. Many global businesses such as Shopify, Airbnb, SoundCloud, GitHub, Hulu have been using Ruby on Rails ever since its launch.


Why Ruby On Rails Is The Most Suitable For A SaaS-Based System?

Developing SaaS-based systems using Ruby on Rails have proven and undeniable advantages for the developer and the businesses, that can be summed as under:


Easy Up-scaling

Startups and mid-market entities into development do not have to worry about switching to a new platform or software with the expansion of their customer base. Ruby on Rails is agile enough for the web application to efficiently handle a sudden surge of users at any given instance. Further, to achieve high scalability, Ruby on Rails features modular code.


Great Performance & Efficiency

Ruby on Rails is based on industry-acclaimed philosophies like “do not repeat yourself.” and convention over configuration. It makes RoR very developer-friendly and hence has been a clear choice for SaaS-based product development.

With RoR, developers can plug new functions and features into SaaS-based applications efficiently. Some open-source libraries are also available that can shorten the development cycle, effectively curtailing the development cost.


High Security

One of the most important benefits of using Ruby on Rails for SaaS-based product development is its secured nature. RoR helps protect the system against various threats like SQL injection and XSS attacks. Further, the Ruby on Rails framework intuitively protects against all the standard security issues and takes appropriate action in case of a breach.


Versatile Nature

Ruby on Rails is a highly versatile framework with the ability to integrate other frameworks and technologies. It allows developers the opportunity to alter the SaaS-based application depending upon the customer’s needs. They can also make live updates and changes to the application.


Final Notes

These were some of the most important reasons why Ruby on Rails is suitable for Saas-based product development. However, besides the capabilities of Ruby on Rails, it does take the proven skillsets and business understanding of the development team to build a winning SaaS-based application.

Like other businesses, if you too are looking for SaaS Based System, Mindfire Solutions can be your partner of choice. We have deep expertise in Ruby on Rail Capabilities. With a team of highly skilled and certified software professionals, that have developed many custom solutions for our global clients over the years.

Here are a few interesting projects we have done to develop SaaS Systems with Ruby on Rails. Click here to know more:

Case study for a buisness tech solution.

Case study for an influencer marketing solution.

Product line content management case study.

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AI in Healthcare

AI in Healthcare Insurance

AI has transformed industries and has immense potential to reshape the healthcare landscape. Medical data like patient visits, prescriptions contain valuable information which can be extracted to create a more structured data format. This has become possible with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. This in turn offers insights into the trends and facilitates collaboration between different healthcare units. Applications for AI in healthcare range from early detection of symptoms to potential diagnosis at a fraction of the cost and increased accuracy.

What is Optical Character Recognition?

Artificial intelligence refers to the use of Machine Learning algorithms to mimic human behavior. Say we want to create a program that takes an input and gives an output. The program uses some decision-making mechanism to arrive at an output. This is primitively done by something called IF-ELSE statements. The limitation of these statements is that one needs to know the exact condition that will produce the desired output. For example, we know the marks of a student and we want to assign a grade, we can hardcode the same using if-else statements – IF marks > 90 then grade = ‘A’. In this case, we have a clearly defined boundary that helps us arrive at our output. But what happens when we don’t have a clearly defined boundary?

Let me explain this with an example. Suppose we have an image of a letter. And we want our program to tell us which letter it is. What kind of code shall we write? This is an example of a problem that doesn’t have a clearly defined boundary. One way to solve this problem is to build a model, which does not use if-else statements but works quite differently. The idea is to feed the program an input image (say an image of ‘A’) and tell the program that it’s an ‘A’. We do this repetitively and try to get the program to learn what ‘A’ looks like. Hence, the term “Machine Learning”. We do the same for every letter or number. This falls under the computer vision category, namely Optical Character Recognition.

Overview of Natural Language Processing :

Natural language Processing is an area of AI and Linguistics and it deals with the application of computational techniques and models to the analysis of human languages. NLP deals with processing written text including but not limited to extracting useful information such as named entities, etc. This requires an understanding of what a word means, which is not something computers generally have. This too is done by learning, where a huge amount of text is fed to the model, and it will try to learn patterns and dependencies between words. In the next section, we will define a problem statement and see how an application of these two concepts can help us make better decisions faster, way faster.

Problems faced by the Healthcare Industry :

Insurance companies have certain parameters to account for when finalizing the premiums they charge for their insurance. One of the most important parameters is the medical history of the member/ insurance holder. The idea is that if a member has more cases of medical history then that member is more likely to raise a claim in the future, thereby costing more.

So the insurance companies need to know relevant details of the medical history and assign risk scores (this could be a topic for another article) corresponding to the medical history. But medical histories are generally stored in paper form. Suppose you had a doctor’s visit, everything there is generally stored in paper format. One might have had any number of tests, and these are in most cases available in paper form. Thus, going through all the paperwork of a member’s medical history is an engaging task. This might take a person anywhere between 30mins – 1 hour. So, is there a way to automate the task?

How can AI help to resolve the issue?

The first step in the process is to get the images of all our documents. The idea is to use OCR to extract the text information from images and subsequently use NLP to extract relevant information, such as diagnosis, procedure or operation, medications that the member is on, etc. There are many open-source OCR engines, one such engine is Tesseract OCR.

Tesseract is used for text detection within large documents or used in concurrence with an external text detector. It can be used directly or through an API to extract text from images. It supports Unicode and has the ability to discern more than 100 languages and can also be trained to recognize multiple languages. The current model, Tesseract 4 focuses on line recognition. It also supports the legacy Tesseract 3 in recognizing character patterns. It is compatible with many programming languages and frameworks. CNN (Convolutional Neural network) is typically used for single character whereas RNN is used for multi-characters.

The next step is to feed the image to the tesseract engine. It will give a file output that contains text extracted from the image. There are various Open source NLP engines. We then feed lines from the text file to our NLP engine which will read each line and use dependencies between words to figure out what our diagnosis, procedure or medications will be. Most NLP engines offer phrase matching capabilities, so we can look for particular phrases as well. We can narrow our search to a specific diagnosis (or any other information of relevance) as well.

Final Steps :

Once we have extracted output from the NLP engine, we can create a database that will have fields such as member name, document type, extracted information, etc. We can use the above pipeline and feed it numerous files at once. After every output, we can append the same to our database.

This process takes a mere few seconds to go through all the files of a member. Using this, we will be able to read through the medical history of thousands of members in a matter of hours.

Like other businesses, if you too are looking to develop applications for AI in healthcare, Mindfire Solutions can be your partner of choice. We have deep expertise in AI and ML Capabilities. With a team of highly skilled and certified software professionals, that have developed many custom solutions for our global clients over the years.

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Application Migration

Why Should Enterprises Consider Migrating Applications From .Net To Python?

Market Landscape

Technology is evolving, and keeping up with the latest trends in programming languages and computer coding provides a competitive advantage to institutions. Coding skills form a core part of the successful functioning of banks, automobiles, hospitals, and every aspect of our tech requirements. However, choosing the correct programming language in IT, data analytics, application migration, research, web designing, and engineering segments is vital.

Software development involves continual learning about programming tactics and new languages. The accelerated demand for ‘online’ has fueled the need for programming languages. It becomes vital to optimize software development capabilities to be at par with the latest trends to help better efficiency, customization, and customization and its smart implementation.

Technology Overview

What drives the success of programming languages can be determined by their implementation in the corporate and academic segments. Today, in academics, advanced-level programming holds a dominant share. Businesses can take advantage of the latest technology for their in-house training and initiate activities for employees both online and offline.

Gaining insights on the latest market trends, Python is a dynamic, free open source, and interpreted programming language that most software developers favorably consider. It supports object-oriented programming as well as procedural-oriented programming.

Python has bagged second place as the most common programming language in 2019. It has also secured third place in 2021, as per a report published by Statista. Also, Github and Google Trends reported Python as one of the most popular programming languages in the world in 2020.

On the other hand, .Net is a free and open-source, managed computer software framework for Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems developed by Microsoft in the 90s. In 2020, The One Technologies reported .Net as one of the top frameworks for web development.

Let’s identify a much-developed technology that can enhance an enterprise’ capabilities.

.Net Features

.Net is a free-of-cost open-source platform and helps to develop: applications, websites, games, and IoT (Internet of Things). It is a cross-platform software framework that helps to create websites on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Similarly, Xamarin/Mono is a type of .Net implementation which is in use only for running apps.

.Net also has a built-in automated monitoring system named ASP.Net. The ASP.Net constantly monitors web pages and caters to issues such as memory leaks or infinite loops. The developers are notified immediately, which ensures stability in all .Net applications.

Python Components

Python is an object-oriented programming language recognized for its simplicity and readability of syntax. Global industries use this programming language to automate their tasks and analyze data. They also use it for other purposes like website building, machine learning, and software testing. Today, Python is among the most versatile programming languages used.

Apart from programming or data sciences, Python can also perform various tasks such as keeping track of stock prices and managing inventory.

Application migration from .Net to Python

The latest trends in the market today show that industries are vastly adopting Python for their tasks. This has become possible with application migration from existing languages to Python. Let’s learn its importance with its key components in comparison with .Net.

● .Net is a framework that supports multiple programming languages (C# (C-sharp), F# (F-sharp), and Visual Basic) for web development. On the other hand, Python is an enhanced programming language that has also developed several frameworks for web development like Django and Flask.

● To use C#, one needs to have complete knowledge of Java. In contrast, Python doesn’t have many prerequisites. Another highlighted feature of Python is that it was built on the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle. It means writing quality code needs minimum effort.

● Syntax of Python is also much more straightforward than C#. In Python, one does not have to end every line with a semicolon. It’s very easy to read and has lots of whitespaces. If a program takes ten lines of code in C#, the same program in Python will take around 4 or 5 lines of code.

● With the help of Python, the work and duration of the project reduces to almost half.

Now let us compare Python frameworks Django and Flask with the .Net framework.

● Python has excellent compatibility with machine learning. .Net Framework offers ML.Net and libraries like Accord.NET to develop ML models. However, these models have limited applications as comapared to Python. It is one of the significant reasons why application migration to Python has become prevalent.

● All the .Net implementations have been given one standard API called .Net Standard. Along with this also a massive collection of libraries is built on .Net Standard. All of the libraries, runtime, and compiler of .Net are present on Github for free.

● The massive libraries of Python are available in source and binary form. It is also freely available for all platforms. By using Python, one of the added benefits is its large community. Unlike the .Net community, the Python community is very active and consistently adds new functionalities to its already vast collection of libraries. It means the developers can do more work on Python by doing less.

● Also, as compared to .Net Framework, Django has a much better ORM. At times, enterprises prefer Flask framework over .Net because of its lightweight and minimal nature.

Choosing the right Python framework is crucial for a successful project. Explore our insightful article: Detailed comparison of the best Python frameworks to find the best fit for your development needs. Make an informed decision and embark on a seamless and efficient development journey

If your business is seeking application migration services, consider partnering with Mindfire Solutions. Specializing in .Net to Python migration, we offer comprehensive Python software development services to facilitate seamless transitions. With a team of highly skilled and certified software professionals, that have developed many custom solutions for our global clients over the years.

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Cross Platform Application Development

Is React Native The Clear Choice For Cross-Platform Application Development?

Mobile Applications Overview

As of 2020, there are around 218 billion app downloads reported globally. Companies generated revenue of US $462 billion through mobile application development. According to an industry report, it is anticipated that by the end of 2023, mobile apps are expected to generate more than US $935 in revenue.

More and more enterprises are now focusing on developing their mobile applications.
Selecting the right app development platform or framework is essential, as the application would contribute to the business’s profit. Therefore, creating a user-friendly app that has a top-notch user interface is vital for them. However, making such an app is not an easy task.

The two most used mobile operating systems globally are Android and iOS. Therefore, everyone develops mobile apps for these two systems only.  Android and iOS, each of them has provided its platforms and tools to create applications. The only problem here is that apps developed on Android cannot function on the iOS platform and vice versa. “Isn’t there a way to build an app for both operating systems?’ – This is one question that people are grappling with.

It is here that cross-platform apps come into the picture. Before we know why React Native is the best choice for application development, let us understand the concept of cross-platform applications.

What Is Cross-Platform Application Development

The applications that work only on iOS or Android (works on one or the other) are called native apps. Native apps are built for a specific OS; they seamlessly integrate with the smartphone’s hardware and delivers the best UI experience possible.

Furthermore, to develop native applications on iOS and Android, an enterprise would have to hire two different teams. This means that React native applications require more workforce and money to create it. Cross-platform applications are those which are used on multiple operating systems or platforms at once. By creating a cross-platform application, developers don’t have to write different code for different OSs.

More importantly, cross-platform development saves enterprises a lot of time, and they don’t have to hire two different teams of developers. Therefore, creating cross-platform applications has become a popular choice among companies, and it has become a common practice to use this approach for app development.

There are many mobile application frameworks available for cross-platform development. React Native is one of them.

Overview Of React Native

React Native is a mobile application framework created by Facebook and made available in 2015. It’s an open-source platform. React Native uses JavaScript as its programming language.

React Native transforms the code to the native APIs that help it integrate with the device hardware.The stability that React Native provides is far better than other frameworks. A single code can create applications for different platforms. This code can also be edited in case there are any updates in the future. With the help of many pre-existing codes available on React Native, the developers can finish the assigned project faster.

The number of users for react Native have risen exponentially, since it’s release. Github in 2018 recorded it as the second-highest choice for any repositories. In current times React Native is the second most popular cross-platform application development framework.

Many world-renowned companies such as Instagram, Facebook, Flipkart, Tesla, Shopify, and others have used React Native to develop their applications.

Let us learn why React Native is the best choice for cross-platform app development.

React Native Enables Efficiency

Some reasons why React Native is a clear choice:

● One aspect that is most unique about React Native is its ability to provide code reusability. Project managers and engineers are the ones who appreciate this capability the most. It is also found that 90 % of the code written for iOS can be used on Android and vice versa.

● Another benefit of React Native is that web application code can be used for mobile application development if both are on React Native. It saves a lot of time for the companies. The price of production comes down when project duration reduces.

● The developers much appreciate the UI (User Interface) offered by React Native. As the reactive Native framework uses JavaScipt; it is responsive and has less buffering time. Hence React Native enhances the user experience.

● If developers face any problem while coding, the large community of React Native can help them resolve the issues. The community members often share their experiences. Therefore it is also possible that solutions to their problems are already available on the platform.

Now, let’s compare React Native with one of its major competitors, Flutter

Like React Native, cross platform appplications also use Flutter for application developement. But unlike React Native, Flutter uses Google’s Dart as its programming language. Dart is a new programming language as compared to JavaScript. There are instances when enterprises prefer Flutter over React Native.

Does that mean Flutter is a better choice? The answer to this question is not very straightforward. Both the frameworks have something different to offer, and one is better at some things than the other.

Here are some areas where React Native has the upper hand over Flutter.

● The advantage of choosing React Native is that developers find JavaScript a much easier language than Dart. This is the reason why finding a proficient software developer for React Native is less complicated.

● As React Native has been around longer, it is backed up by more than thousands of packages. This number is nearly five times higher than the Flutter.

● Whenever there will be a discussion on the user interface, React Native will always be a winner. The UI experience of React Native is more dynamic than Flutter’s.

● The installation and configuration process of React Native is simple. Where else, in the case of Flutter, things are a little bit complicated.

Final Thoughts

From the above pointers, we can conclude that React Native is one of the top choices for developing a cross-platform application. If you are confused about choosing between Flutter and React Native, select the platform depending on your requirements.

Lastly, you should know that the future of React Native is looking bright due to its simplicity and capability of solving development problems. That is the reason why most businesses prefer React Native for cross-platform development.

Like other businesses, if you too are looking for cross platform Application development, Mindfire Solutions can be your partner of choice. We have deep expertise in React Native . With a team of highly skilled and certified software professionals, that have developed many custom solutions for our global clients over the years. Click here to know more:

Here are a few interesting projects we have done to develop cross platform applications with React Native.

Case study for an e-Commerce web and mobile Application development for Android and iOS

Case study for an application on B2B Merchandising

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Effective Learning image

Thoughts on Effective Learning

Learning – Reality!

Whether it is today or in the past, learning is inevitable. If you want to grow in whatever work/business you are in, learning has to be your primary focus all the time. Whoever you are as a professional – Physician, Lawyer, CA, Architect, Engineer, IT professional….. people who excel in their field of work are the ones who constantly indulge in effective learning. They make themselves disciplined, focused, and build their learning habits over time.

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But what if one doesn’t have the urge to adapt to the changing needs and keep up the pace! Needless to say, more likely than not, they will have to deal with some harsh realities. But what is that reality in effective learning? It is this:

Development or Survival or Life for that matter will become more difficult for those:

Who stop growing and learning:

If you look around you will definitely see people who never make an effort to grow, at times they even think that they will grow automatically as time passes by. Such are the people for whom life is more difficult than it would have been if they were learning effectively and continuously. Imagine what would have happened if noble laureates had stopped learning and growing! And if famous scientists we know had done the same as well. I am sure you will agree this world would have been a very different place than what we are witnessing today. It just doesn’t matter how successful you are at the moment. If you stop effective learning, trust me, you are surely going down the road to failure.

Who don’t think effectively?

Have you ever wondered why one person succeeds more than the other, even if they had the same upbringing/schooling/academics/opportunities etc. The simple answer could be in the way a successful person thinks. It is really important how do we think – whether it is effective thinking or just some involuntary action. In learning, it is very important to think effectively. Your thoughts will determine whether you will be a successful person or just another guy. There is an age-old story, where 3 people were working at the construction site. When the supervisor came in and asked the first person about what he was doing, he said: “I am mixing material that is to be used by the other person”. The second guy responded saying “I am laying the bricks to create a wall”. The last person said, “ I am building a Mansion”. So although all 3 were doing something related to that construction, only one had a different perception. I am sure you must have read this story earlier as well. Your effective thoughts/vision holds true when it comes to succeeding or not succeeding. Learning also requires effective thinking. You should never think that only when a certain requirement or tech-stack is needed, that I will learn. That will never happen, my friend.

Remember this: it is always good to showcase what you know instead of “only saying” what you know 🙂

Who don’t face reality?

Facing and accepting reality is another crucial aspect of effective learning. People sound miserable when they keep saying that Someday I will do this or someday I will do that….and that day never arrives.

Author Alex Haley had remarked and I quote him here “Either you deal with what is reality, or you can be sure that reality is going to deal with you.”

In my opinion what a perfect quote. If you want to climb a mountain then it will never happen overnight or it will never happen without the proper training and conditioning that is needed to climb. But one has to be proactive in seeking them, and not postpone matters to a later time.

Isn’t it the same with learning? Learning MEAN or MERN or PWA or for that matter AI or Data Science or Blockchain all requires those steps and actions, otherwise it will always be a mountain that someday you will.

Who are slow to make proper adjustments?

This always reminds me of the stock market. How many times have we seen that people who don’t put stop-losses and make proper adjustments in their portfolio lose more consistently. Making proper adjustments with time always proves to be more effective. If you have accepted the reality and have begun taking the required action then the intent has to be to stay on the track and not let anything distract you. There might be situations that demand your attention. But those should only lead you to recalibrate your action plan. Your commitment to your goal should persist.

A perfect example would be – You are idle and you start learning how to climb a mountain in the form of Machine Learning (it could be anything though), but as you get more work, instead of adjusting to the same you get distracted and start telling yourself that when I get the time, I will resume… which may or may not happen. Overall a vicious loop to get into.

It doesn’t mean you focus on your learning only, client/works is always a priority, but adjusting your time to learn is equally important.

Who don’t respond correctly to challenges?

Challenges or adversities always provide an opportunity for growth. All great ideas emerge out of adverse situations or problems. People who ignore the problem don’t solve it, whereas those who face the problems by taking them head-on are the ones who more often than not come out of it successfully. How true with the context of learning. Isn’t it right that when you face a challenging /complex task you end up learning more from it than otherwise! What if you had never faced any complex or challenging situations ever? I am sure you would have been a rotten lemon, else you would have made lemonade out of the same already 🙂

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So, go out and learn more, think effectively, face reality, make the right adjustments, and face the challenges. You will see a different person sooner than later. Don’t be a victim of your own mindset.

Quote: Victim mindset causes people to focus on what they cannot do instead of what they can do, it is a recipe for continued failure.

Happy Effective Learning.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. To know more about our company, please click on Mindfire Solutions.  For over 20+ years now, we have been the preferred Software Development Partner of over 1000+ Small and Medium-sized enterprises across the globe.

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Leveraging Kubernetes for End-to-End Quality Assurance

Kubernetes is an all-in-one container orchestration tool that helps in the management, deployment, monitoring, and scaling of systems for containerized applications which are all packaged in one open-source system. If your organization works with containerized applications using Docker, then you would already know that things become tedious, and it becomes difficult to manage them when they scale up.

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Classic QA Process:

Here, the end-user only interacts with the front-end user interface in both monolithic and containerized applications. Similarly, the traditional QA process can be used for containerized applications but should be seen as a subset of the QA process in the Kubernetes world. UI or API testing using tools like selenium or Rest- assured can be used for automation testing for applications running on Kubernetes, but this is a costly process that requires high investment in terms of time, money & resources. To overcome this, it requires us to look outside the box to find better solutions that can be paired up with these and provide better coverage right from the beginning. This would result in the scope of the QA process getting increased when applied to Kubernetes applications.

Enhanced QA Process (hybrid) for Kubernetes Applications:

Kubernetes applications are generally deployed using continuous integration and continuous delivery. To assist the developers in the release cycle, the traditional approach of creating end-to-end tests is not adequate and now requires QA to work very closely with developers on the tests so that it can be written quickly and executed swiftly.

Hybrid QA Process

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The following are the new technologies that help in accomplishing the full potential of the QA process in the Kubernetes world.

  1. AB Testing
  2. Chaos Engineering
  3. Consumer-Driven Contract Testing
  4. Helm Tests
AB Testing:

The complexity of applications has increased vastly, and business requires constant UI updates and feedback based on the frontend changes. The business stakeholders hire marketing and research teams to attract more customers and convert more leads from different marketing campaigns.

Here Kubernetes gives us the power to leverage continuous feedback by using the customers as testers and present real-time statistics for businesses to make decisions in real-time

AB Testing

Chaos Engineering:

Chaos engineering tests the resilience and weakness of a system in production by creating expected chaos in the system to verify that none of the activities has affected the performance and stability of the system. This builds confidence that the system can handle unexpected situations and that any failures that exist can be addressed before the customers face the brunt.  Since they get known to the QA team in advance, it gives them the opportunity to fix those unexpected outages before they actually affect large groups of users. Some examples can include scenarios like increasing load on a Microservice, introducing DNS failures, Mimicking hard drive failure, etc.

This can be achieved by using Free and open-source tools available depending upon the cloud provider on which the system is hosted. For example, one of the better-known tools is Chaos Monkey used by Netflix for cloud-hosted Kubernetes clusters.

Chaos Engineering

Consumer-Driven Contract Testing:

Often times while working with microservices, creating full end-to-end integration tests are expensive and requires high execution time. Even if you hit failures, it is hard to figure out which service is causing the failure if the complexity of the system is high. We can create Consumer-Driven Contract Testing using Pact which is available in almost all languages. It makes it easy to write the integration tests and helps us to test consumer-provider rules using JSON files.

So, what is a pact? PACT is a binding contract between the consumer and the provider, which has to be always followed. In the world of microservices, the pact is based on the API call (consumer) and response (provider). It can be done using either a single isolated microservice (while mocking the other microservices) or on a real system with all microservices running.

Why use PACT when we can write end-to-end integration tests?  Well, it helps us create tests before we move to write expensive integration tests and can provide us with the general sanity of all the microservices running in our system.

Consumer Driven Contract Testing

Helm Tests:

Most organizations use Helm charts to deploy Kubernetes resources on Kubernetes clusters. These charts are really powerful and often contain tests written in the chart which can be used to test if all the resources got deployed successfully to our Kubernetes cluster.

Since Helm tests use a scripting language to perform basic sanity checks on the deployed resource, we should leverage the tests provided by popular charts over the internet. In case, you are making in-house helm charts, then you might want to skip this for some better integration test since tests written in scripting language can be difficult to write and maintain.

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With the fast evolution of the application architecture and introduction of DevOps culture, the traditional QA process is not able to provide the same value for money and is often seen as one of the bottlenecks when it comes to the release cycle. Hence, QA must design and plan their framework to provide a blend of fast test results and improved end-to-end integration tests. The role of QA is now changing from Quality Assurance to Quality Assistance. Since the QA process has to be optimized as per the AUT, this article hopefully has helped you in identifying the process of a robust end-to-end QA framework for applications running on the Kubernetes cluster.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. To know more about our company, please click on Mindfire Solutions.  For over 20+ years now, we have been the preferred Software Development Partner of over 1000+ Small and Medium-sized enterprises across the globe.

 

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VoIP Call Image

CallKit integration for VoIP Apps

Most of us by now are accustomed to using the services of a third-party provider to make VoIP calls over desktops, laptops, and smartphones. But making VoIP over Native iOS apps was never a convenient task. In fact, Apple has completely restricted the use of VoIP push for any kind of background processing from iOS-13. Earlier developers were using VoIP push for making call (audio/video) notifications or some other processing in the background. Apple took this decision to avoid the overbearing process that was happening in the background. It was not only leading to disproportionately high consumption of resources but also a significant drain of battery capacity.

A typical VoIP call usually comes as a notification on one’s screen, and in order to receive it, the user needs to slide the notification and also type a passcode to receive, if locked. Burdensome! Isn’t it? Especially if compared to how a native app eases the same experience.

The solution to this comes with CallKit, which is a framework that is capable of elevating your third-party VoIP app experience to a very intuitive one. You get the same rich, full-screen native call UI to accept and attend the calls. Once a call is accepted you also get a “Callback “option to initiate the same function (WebRTC) which you have used earlier. You can also set custom ringtones for your app that would be different from native call ringtones.

CallKit Integration for VoIP Apps

CallKit Integration for VoIP Apps

Besides, if you are on a call in your app and you start getting native calls, you will be able to hold and swap the calls. It could be an audio call, facetime call, or even another VoIP call. Even your call history will be stored in the call directory (missed, received, dialed calls, and add-in favorites). You can also make the call from Siri, Bluetooth, and access the “Do not disturb” functionality.

CallKit Integration for VoIP Apps - VoIP Architecture

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. To know more about our company, please click on Mindfire Solutions.  For over 20+ years now, we have been the preferred Software Development Partner of over 1000+ Small and Medium-sized enterprises across the globe.

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Unsure if your Enterprise needs a Website or a Mobile App?

The remark “There is an app for that” is so common nowadays and underlines the deep influence of mobile apps in our lives. But, when Apple went on to register a trademark for it, you knew it was more than that. 

So, you have decided to go digital and create an online identity for your business. But, you are stuck with the difficulty of choosing between a mobile app and a website. Eager to get a quick solution? Turns out, in most of the cases, both mobile app and website are not mutually exclusive but are complementary, with each serving a different purpose and target segment. So, there isn’t an answer that is universally correct. It depends on various different things.

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App First

Some cases are better served with mobile apps, especially the ones that need frequent or repeated use. For instance, e-commerce, food ordering, social media, chat, news, travel, productivity-related applications, utility apps, real-time tracking like stock apps.

App Only

Then there are those which, because of their dependency on the underlying hardware, can only be served through mobile apps. For instance, home automation, alarm, games, navigation apps, mobile wallets, AR(Augmented Reality) & VR(Virtual Reality) apps and games.

Website or Mobile App?

For the sake of this article, the above two categories need not be considered, for the obvious reason that the mobile app seems to be the default choice for them. However, for categories that can be served equally well by both the mediums, there are certain inherent advantages of using either an app or a website. Let’s understand them from the perspectives of a user and a business.

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User’s point of view, what really matters.

1. Convenience

Websites are convenient for informative and non-frequent use like finding details about a business, exploring a place, looking for services, R&D for projects, and yes, deciding the best app to download for a particular need. Basically, all the Google searches we do can be better served by a website. Mobile apps seem to be more convenient for activities that are performed more frequently. The initial hurdles of downloading and setting things up might seem daunting. But things ease out subsequently, and users get pulled into a more convenient, personalized, and engaging experience.

2. Data Consumption and Offline Mode

To use a mobile app one needs to download it first, an act pulls into the mobile resources that the app will need to function -images, icons, layout inbuilt, etc. Once done, there isn’t much left to download during consumption, which results in quicker loading and sometimes offline access too. In contrary to this, you can’t even load the website without an internet connection.

For mobile apps, during the offline mode, tasks can be queued up in batches and then be pushed to the server when online. Such a sophisticated way of dealing with the offline mode isn’t just possible in case of a website.

3. Performance

For CPU intensive tasks such as games, heavy graphics layouts, complex lists, mobile app scores way higher than a website for its close proximity to the device hardware.

4. Updates

Whether it’s an app or a website, it gets developed alongside. Hence the user expects updates. Pushing an update to the website is easy, you do it on the server-side and users get a brand new look and feel next time they check you out. If you can strategically manage the downtime, there is not much that bothers the user. On the other hand, the whole app needs to be downloaded all over again to get the update. Not to mention, the review process apps go through to be live in the app store which takes time.

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Business’s point of view

1. Customer base – Existing & Potential

Initial acquisition cost is high for mobile apps. You need to get the user to download your app first, to be able to use it. In contrary to this, anyone can visit your website through any browser and from any device having a browser. People can even find your website through Google search. This opens up a lot of possibilities for your business. In short, you can serve both existing and potential customers through a website. Whereas, mobile apps can only serve the existing user base.

2. User Engagement

Re-engaging with users using rich and powerful notifications and getting meaningful insights through analytics is better done with mobile apps than websites.

3. Learning Curve and Cost of Development

Mobile apps are highly customizable. In terms of features and capabilities, they can do a whole lot of stuff that a website can’t do, thanks to the close hardware integration. This, combined with the tons of possible unique use cases, helps create an ever-increasing range of UI/UX and feature possibilities. Thus, you have a steep learning curve even if you need to build a basic app. In other words, there is no such thing called an ‘App builder’. Even if you can find one, chances are, it will let you create a basic HTML type webpage app or an app functioning as a container of your website. In that case, you are better off creating a responsive website instead. Not to mention the whole point of creating an app is to create a tool for your users and you want it to be fully customizable in the first place.

On the other hand, a single screen website with some basic viewable features can be made using website builders needing almost no technical skills. A few examples would include blogging sites, personal/resume type websites, a website showing just the details of your business. However, to create a customized and full-featured website, you need a lot of technical skills.

4. Multiple platform support

Because of the way they have been distributed around the globe, you can’t ignore any of the 2 major platforms of the mobile OS- iOS & Android. People in the US, Canada, Australia, and European nations prefer iOS, whereas, Android is the global leader in terms of market share. Apart from this, iOS users are generally high paying customers in any region. This essentially means, to get high ARPU(Average Revenue Per User) you need to support iOS and to get to the masses, you need to support Android.

Mobile OS preference across the world

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(credit: https://deviceatlas.com/blog/android-v-ios-market-share)

Supporting 2 completely independent OS will result in higher development and maintenance costs. On the other hand, a single set of code will result in a website which works universally for every device with a browser.

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Website vis-à-vis Mobile Apps! Can one replace the other?

No matter how tightly websites and apps are attached, they are uniquely placed with each serving a purpose different from the other. However, the matter of the fact is that they cannot replace each other. We might see things in the future that will bridge the gap between them both from the business and the user’s point of view. In fact, we already have things like Progressive Web Apps and tools like Flutter and React which are trying to bring websites and apps closer in terms of use and development.

Even Technologies like AR which is by far better served by mobile apps are finding their way to websites. By creating a new file type USDZ, Apple has made it possible for websites to enable users to try 3D virtual objects in their Physical space. This creates a compelling possibility for E-Commerce websites. Of course, for this to work, the website needs to be viewed on a mobile phone/iPad with a camera supporting AR.

To draw an analogy, mobile app and website are like parallel lines, they remain close to each other without overlapping in terms of their existence. We might speculate about their getting merged in the distant future but that distant future might just never come.

Final Thoughts?

Your website is your online identity. As businesses have an office address in the physical world, they have a website in the digital one. And, a mobile app is like a tool you provide to the user to get things done with ease, as well as engage. In most of the cases, you will need to have both.

Depending upon the nature and the stage a business is in, one medium might find itself positioned more favorably than the other. But, when the cost is not a deterrent, it has become customary to embrace both the website and the mobile app, almost as if they were an obligation. It gives a business the chance to meander seamlessly into the mental realms of its target customers, the users, and unleash many possibilities.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. To know more about our company, please click on Mindfire Solutions.  For over 20+ years now, we have been the preferred Software Development Partner of over 1000+ Small and Medium-sized enterprises across the globe.

 

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Golang

Golang : A Hype or the Future?

Created by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson for Google, GoLang was reportedly built by developers when they were waiting for the code compilation to complete in a project. The three main capabilities they certainly sought-after were the ease of coding, efficient code-compilation and efficient execution. Bringing all these capabilities in one language is what made Go so special.

Go is an open-source, procedural, statically-typed, compiled, and general-purpose programming language. The compiler was originally written in C but is now written in Go as well, which keeps the language self-hosted. the language has seen a lot of success in the last couple of years. A large portion of the modern cloud, networking, and DevOps software is written in Go, eg. Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform. Go is also being used by many companies for general-purpose development.

As the requirement for performance keeps growing, hardware continues to get sophisticated over time, the manufacturers keep on adding cores to the system to keep up with the ever-increasing demand. To handle such an increasing number of cores the system needs to maintain database connections through microservices, manage the queues and maintain caches. This is why today’s hardware requires a programming language that can support concurrency better, and that can scale up performance with the increase of added cores over time.

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Golang versus Other Languages

Languages are compared predominantly on two factors 

  1. Ease of programming
  2. Efficiency

These factors are usually inversely proportional, meaning that any language that has high “ease of programming” usually has low “efficiency” and vice versa. Go holds the sweet spot with great efficiency and adequate “ease of programming”.

Why “Golang” and not “C++”

Go and C++ are both compiled languages and both have similar speed(In fact, C++ is a bit faster than Go). But the garbage collector in Go is what sets it apart from C and C++.

Any complex program makes use of dynamically allocated memory, and this allocated memory needs to be freed when it is not required. If that is not done, the program would eventually use up all the available memory and crash. In the case of servers, it is absolutely required to do that as it is expected to run indefinitely. In C and C++, the user is forced to deallocate all the memory that they have allocated themselves or use a third party garbage collector. In the case of Go, all the dynamically allocated memory with no reference is automatically garbage collected, making it a lot easier to work with.

Concurrency and “Golang”

Many programming languages weren’t natively designed for concurrent programming. They lack proper design for concurrent execution, and so, they often slow down the pace of programming, compiling and execution. This is where Go comes as the most viable option to support a multithreading environment and concurrency both.

Eg: Language like python only allows one thread to access the interpreter at a time and essentially never runs two threads in parallel. So running two processor-heavy tasks at a time in python in separate threads would have the same if not worse result than running them in the same thread.

The Go scheduler unlike schedulers in other languages manages the concurrency fully by itself. It doesn’t map Goroutines to OS-level threads directly. Instead, it re-uses a few OS-level threads. This reduces the context switching delay significantly as most of the context switching is done at application-level and not Kernel level.

What is the call stack and why is it important in threads?

In case of threads, stack is used to store function return pointers (where to return the result of a function call) and static variables. Goroutine has a dynamic growable call stack which starts from only 4KB and can go up to the total memory capacity. Other languages, in contrast, have static stack sizes, usually of 1MB (determined by the OS).

This growable stack in Go is one of the key things which makes Goroutines light-weight. Where other languages can only have a few concurrent blocks, Go can have a lot more because of its dynamic stack size.

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Conclusion

Taking into account all the offerings from Golang, we notice that it distinguishes considerably in terms of

  •  Faster compilation and execution
  •  Better code readability and documentation
  •  Offering a thoroughly consistent language
  •  Easy versioning
  •  Allowing development with multiple languages
  •  Allowing easier maintenance of dependencies

These features surely make Golang a contender for the next-generation programming language.

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If you have any queries in this field, talk to Mindfire Solutions. For over 20+ years now, we have been the preferred Software Development Partner of over 1000+ Small and Medium-sized enterprises across the globe.

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Swift 5 Vs ObjC

Is Swift the Objective Choice now?

‘Swift Vs Objective-C’– It is one of the first Google searches every iOS developer does before beginning their journey into the world of app development. At a broader level, choosing between Objective-C and Swift is also one of the fundamental and crucial decisions every business makes before beginning any iOS app development work.

So if the question is Swift or Objective-C? The answer cannot be in binary. If you have an existing application already written in Objective-C, then you can weigh the benefits of switching over to Swift vs sticking to Objective-C. However, if you are planning a new app, then Swift should be your default choice.

Why so? Well, read on to know…

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The Story so far

Apple launched a new programming language called Swift in WWDC in October 2014. It came as a surprise to every developer as it was intended to replace Objective-C as the main programming language on Apple’s platforms, which by all means was stable, proven and had been around for more than two decades, powering millions of apps.

The goal was far-sighted. Swift was designed to be safer, faster, and easier to maintain. Though initially built for Apple platforms, it was aimed to be able to support all platforms. Before becoming Open Source, Swift was designed ground up by Apple using decades of Objective-C experience adding a modern touch derived from the latest programming trends and good practices. It was designed to have all the goodness of a modern-day programming language. Though a descendant of Objective-C, it is fundamentally different in terms of design, syntax, programming style and memory management.

But replacing a decades’ long programming language with a new one cannot be an overnight affair. There were thousands of libraries and hundreds of frameworks already written and working with Objective-C, as they were supposed to. Rewriting them using an infant language did not seem logical. Thus, Objective-C runtime continues to access Apple platform frameworks like UIKit, WatchKit, and AppKit. And Swift has the capability to interface seamlessly and work on top of it.

From the very beginning, Swift is fully compatible with Objective-C, as it should be. Both languages can still co-exist on all Apple platforms. And Apple isn’t likely to change this in the foreseeable future unless it has any strong reason to do that.

Support for interactive programming using Playground enables developers to test their idea live without building and running applications.

In terms of programming capabilities and flexibility, Swift has a lot to offer. Its functional programming style, and strongly typed language makes it impossible to have run time crashes resulting from out-of-bound or type-related issues. It has features like closures, tuples, generics, Structs and enums supporting methods, extensions and protocols, computed properties, powerful extensions, and the list just goes on…

Design-wise factors such as safety, readability, code size, less error-prone, efficient and fast iteration over collections, and other platform support make Swift fundamentally better than Objective-C.

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Why Objective-C then?

Despite being so much powerful, Swift lacked just one thing that triggered Swift vs Objective-C debate, and that is ‘Maturity’. In the earlier years, deciding between Swift and Objective-C was like choosing between a fledgling with a lot of promise and a veteran with proven credentials.

Those who had rushed to develop production apps using Swift version 1 & 2, had to refactor the whole codebase, or just rewrite it again. It wasn’t matured, evolving rapidly, and syntaxes were completely changing in the early iterations. Hence, it was difficult to maintain Swift Apps compared to Objective-C, which was matured, trusted and possessed a huge developer base.

However, after Swift3, syntaxes became relatively stable and some minor refactoring that was needed was taken care of by the Xcode itself. And then Swift4 seemed to be more stable in terms of design and syntaxes, but, it still lacked ABI stability. Then came Swift 5.

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What makes Swift 5 different?

So far, every version of Swift has been better than earlier. But what makes Swift5 so special is ABI stability.

Starting with version 4.2, Swift codes from one version have been compatible with another. However, the application binary, which can be considered as the machine level code for the sake of this argument, wasn’t compatible with that from a different version of Swift. That is, Swift wasn’t ABI stable until recently before version 5 was launched.

With Swift now being ABI stable for all Apple platforms like iOS, WatchOS, macOS and tvOS, all future versions of Swift including Swift5 will be compatible with each other at the binary level. True that Swift will continue to evolve in future releases, but the application written in the current version of Swift will no longer need to be refactored or rewritten to be able to support future versions of OS. In fact, libraries written now will seamlessly coexist and communicate at the binary level with code written in future versions of Swift and vice versa. And the reduction in app size is the immediate benefit it provides to the users now.

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Conclusion

True Objective-C is here to stay. There are millions of applications already running using this. But, it isn’t getting any major updates, most of the updates are just to make it compatible with Swift. As a language, Swift is way superior. And above all, developers with expertise in Objective-C and practicing it will dwindle in years to come.

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If you have any queries in this field, talk to Mindfire Solutions. For over 20+ years now, we have been the preferred Software Development Partner of over 1000+ Small and Medium-sized enterprises across the globe.

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