DEV Community: Helen

Benefits of cloud-based clinic management software

Helen — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 13:24:39 +0000

The shift to cloud-based hospital management systems is redefining how medical facilities operate. Unlike traditional on-premise solutions, cloud HMS platforms offer unmatched flexibility, security, and ease of use. We explore the key advantages of adopting a cloud-based HMS and how it empowers healthcare providers to deliver smarter, more connected care.

Enhanced accessibility and convenience

Cloud-based hospital management software offers unprecedented access across any internet-connected device, enabling healthcare professionals to perform critical tasks anytime, anywhere. Whether it’s a doctor reviewing patient records, a nurse updating clinical notes, or a receptionist scheduling appointments, the system simplifies workflows for every role. This level of accessibility enhances clinic management by supporting real-time coordination and faster response times.

Real-time collaboration across departments

One of the most impactful advantages of cloud-based HMS is the seamless collaboration it fosters. Real-time data sharing between departments ensures that everyone—from lab technicians to physicians—is on the same page. For instance, lab test results can be instantly reflected in the EMR, while nurses can update patient vitals on the spot. This enables synchronized care delivery and reduces delays in patient treatment.

Effortless scalability

Unlike traditional on-premise solutions, cloud HMS platforms scale effortlessly with your organization’s growth. Whether you’re a small clinic expanding services or a large hospital managing thousands of patients, the system can accommodate rising demand without needing additional infrastructure. As more users and patients come on board, features like visits planner and pharmacy management scale accordingly, ensuring operational continuity.

Advanced security and compliance

Reputable cloud providers implement enterprise-grade security protocols, including data encryption, multi-factor authentication, and continuous threat monitoring. They also ensure full compliance with international healthcare standards like HIPAA and GDPR. These measures protect sensitive patient information, which is particularly critical in modules like EMR, invoice management, and prescription records.

Personalized experience for every user

Cloud-based HMS platforms offer customizable dashboards and workflows suited to each user’s role. From a doctor’s tailored patient view to a receptionist’s scheduling tools, the interface is designed for intuitive navigation and ease of use. This personalized experience helps staff handle tasks more efficiently and improves overall adoption of the system across the organization.

Cost-effective and flexible

By shifting to a subscription-based pricing model, cloud HMS significantly reduces the need for costly hardware, server maintenance, and software licenses. This makes it an especially attractive solution for clinics with limited IT budgets. With the ability to pay monthly or annually for only the services in use, such as invoice management or clinic management, healthcare providers gain financial flexibility without sacrificing functionality.

Automatic updates and continuous improvement

Cloud systems are automatically updated with the latest features and security patches, ensuring healthcare organizations always have access to current tools without interruption. These silent, behind-the-scenes upgrades allow systems like the EMR or pharmacy management module to stay current, compliant, and secure—without any action required from staff.

Simplified maintenance and provider support

System maintenance, performance optimization, and technical troubleshooting are all handled by the HMS provider. This offloads the burden from the clinic's internal team, allowing healthcare staff to focus on delivering patient care. With the provider managing system uptime and reliability, users benefit from a streamlined and stress-free operational environment.

Conclusion

Cloud-based hospital management systems are transforming the way clinics and hospitals operate. Their built-in flexibility, reduced upfront costs, and robust functionality make them ideal for healthcare facilities of all sizes.
The full article about Benefits of cloud-based clinic management software is published here.

Continuous Delivery in Software Development

Helen — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 13:01:57 +0000

Continuous Delivery (CD) is the next step in the evolution of the software development process. It draws on Agile methodologies but surpasses it. CD is changing the way software is delivered and opening up a whole range of benefits, ranging from greater adaptability to more reliable products to improved customer experiences.

But what if software continuous delivery means sacrificing quality for speed? Does it really lead to both higher responsiveness and higher reliability? Let’s find out if it really enables you to get better products to your customers more often.

WHAT IS SOFTWARE CONTINUOUS DELIVERY?

This is a methodology that focuses on smaller releases more often to avoid the issues and bugs that come with large, slow releases. This approach can actually make your development more agile and more able to react to changes. It comes with quicker reaction times, less risk and more flexible release options. Continuous software delivery also identifies inefficiencies and hidden costs.
Considering the rapid pace of technological innovation, and consumers’ rising expectations for quality products, it makes sense to evaluate and modernize processes to keep pace with these developments.

BENEFITS OF CONTINUOUS DELIVERY

The practices at the heart of continuous delivery software help us achieve several important benefits:

Lower costs

Any successful product or service will evolve significantly over the course of its lifetime. By investing in build, test, deployment and environment automation, we substantially reduce the cost of making and delivering incremental changes by eliminating many of the fixed costs associated with the release process.

Low-risk releases

The primary goal of continuous delivery software is to make deployments painless, low-risk events that can be performed at any time on demand. By applying patterns such as blue-green deployments it is relatively straightforward to achieve zero-downtime deployments that are undetectable to users.

Faster time to market

It’s not uncommon for the integration and test/fix phase of the traditional phased lifecycle to consume weeks or even months. When teams work together to automate the build and deployment, environment provisioning, and regression testing processes, developers can incorporate integration and regression testing into their daily work and completely remove these phases. We also avoid the large amounts of re-work that plague the phased approach.

Happier team

Peer-reviewed research has shown continuous software development makes releases less painful and reduces team burnout. Furthermore, when we release more frequently, teams can engage more actively with users, learn which ideas work and which don’t and see first-hand the outcomes of the work they have done. By removing the low-value painful activities, we can focus on what we care about most—continuously delighting our users.

Better products

Continuous software development makes it economic to work in small batches. This means we can get feedback from users throughout the lifecycle based on working results. Techniques such as A/B testing enable us to take a hypothesis-driven approach to product development whereby we can test ideas with users before building out whole features. This means we can avoid the 2/3 of features we build that deliver zero or negative value to our businesses.

Higher quality

When developers have automated tools that discover regressions within minutes, teams are free to focus their effort on user research and higher-level testing activities such as exploratory testing, usability testing, and performance and security testing. By building a deployment pipeline, these activities can be performed continuously throughout the development process, ensuring quality is built into products and services from the beginning.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT CONTINUOUS SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

It goes without saying, but the basics are important when you are first setting up a transition to CD.

You need to evaluate what it will take, as well as review overall strategies and stakeholders’ goals.
Next, draw up a schedule of builds and maintenance release cycles; review builds’ dependency management; and identify any gaps in technologies, tools, and processes.
The next major phase involves CI and further defining the process. Develop a CI workflow and document the design flow. It should contain branching strategies, merging strategies, dependencies and multi-site coordination.
Choose CI technologies and tools.
Determine and document the timing for automation; with test automation, release cycles are shortened.

You’re almost there! Now it’s on to the deployment. Key steps include: breaking down the CI workflow into steps, automating the product builds, using a CI framework or building an automation tool to develop the packaging deployment scripts, and consistent reporting and tracking so as to facilitate troubleshooting.

CONCLUSION

This is the Continuous Delivery in a nutshell. In this article, we’ve covered many pros and cons of this approach and briefly described the benefits it can bring to your overall software delivery process.

The full article about Continuous Delivery in Software Development is published here.

Best Hybrid App Framework In 2022

Helen — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 13:46:06 +0000

Nowadays, almost any business cannot be run without a mobile application. However, developing different apps for different platforms (Android, or iOS) takes a lot of resources. That’s why cross-platform applications would be a better choice. To develop them, frameworks are essential, and choosing the right one might be confusing. In this article, we’ll tell about the best hybrid app frameworks in 2022.
Finding out how to choose the best hybrid app framework in 2022 is not as simple as it looks at a first glance. It is a complex technical and business decision that will impact the application’s roadmap for its entire life cycle. To be more specific, the framework choice defines the development team composition, product and project management, frequency of updates, and, ultimately, the set of features offered to the users.

In this article, we’ll evaluate those factors for various frameworks for hybrid app development to help you with making the optimal choice.

Hybrid mobile development frameworks are not a compromise between functionality and cost anymore. Both hybrid and native technologies have evolved alongside mobile platforms and our perception of what can be done with the smartphone. This required more advanced tools for the development, to deliver more applications with much more complex features in less time and with more frequent updates. Because of that, mobile development frameworks have been advancing all this time hand-in-hand with the developers’ needs and users’ expectations.

In addition, the distribution of the market among two major platforms has doubled the amount of work needed to create and maintain one application. And naturally, hybrid frameworks, such as React Native, Xamarin, Flutter, have been raised as an alternative to Swift, Kotlin, and Objective – C.

Historically, the two main approaches in creating a mobile application are hybrid and native. While deciding on the way of development, it is necessary to choose between these two options because they imply different difficulties of the development and maintenance, time spent on it, and other factors.
Despite that each option has its pros and cons, today we’ll look more closely exactly on hybrid development.

The importance of frameworks as a tool for development can hardly be overestimated. Frameworks allow programmers to turn ideas into real software by giving them the convenience of working with pre-designer features, modules, workflows, functions, etc. Besides, frameworks provide better security and integration with other apps by offering the ready-made fragments of code for UI/UX, project structure, authorization, logging, and APIs, for example. That’s why it’s essential to choose the best hybrid app framework in 2022 because this choice can either block or empower the evolution of your app for the years to come.

When the main concepts are clear, let’s dive deeper into the frameworks for hybrid app development and the hybrid mobile development itself.

WHAT IS HYBRID MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT

What defines an approach (native or hybrid) is practically a framework used. Native frameworks are built for an exact platform with such languages as Swift, or Objective-C for iOS and OS X, and Java for Android. While using them, as a result we get an application that works only on a particular OS, and cannot be downloaded and run on others. Hybrid frameworks, while using similar languages and mark-up standards as their basis, allow programmers to utilize almost the whole same codebase (approximately 80% of it) for deploying an app on the other operating system. On the surface, hybrid apps might be perceived as native but as a matter of fact, any specific SDKs weren’t used in the process of their creation. Frameworks allow such applications to access various internal APIs on a device including a flashlight, photo gallery, or location, and the opportunity to provide Face ID, Bluetooth connection, etc. Which APIs can be accessed used to depend on the framework used but now, all of them have enhanced a lot, and provide the maximum possibilities. It can be achieved with the help of third-party plugins but it may affect the app’s performance, not in a good way. The best hybrid app framework in 2022, whether it is Flutter, React Native, or Xamarin, can handle it perfectly.

As for the technologies used for hybrid app development, it varies due to the framework. Flutter is based on a relatively new Dart, a programming language created by Google, React Native uses mostly JavaScript but also Objective C, C++, and Python, and Xamarin is built with .NET based on C#. For the developers, learning one of the hybrid frameworks will allow creating applications for both iOS and Android. Learning, for example, Swift, will take as much time and give access only to iOS.

As the choice is most often about the native and hybrid development, let’s see what advantages each of these options has. Building, testing, support, and maintenance are much easier to provide for a hybrid app as in this case it is necessary to track basically a single app (by “a single app” a single code base is meant). Each of these stages affects the quality of the final result and how fast it will be delivered. At this point (which is quite significant) hybrid app solutions are better than the native ones. Working with a single code base results not only in the speed of result delivery but also in reduced development costs.

As for the native solutions, it is a common opinion that this kind of apps has higher performance but today such a statement gradually losing its sense as the hybrid apps’ quality is enhancing each day, and the differences in their performance are hardly noticeable. Probably, the main advantage of native apps is their security. As they are built intensively for a certain platform, security is much higher, thus, it is reasonable to use solely native solutions for some cases when the highest security possible is required. However, hybrid development is extremely versatile and is able to meet the various expectations of the customers, which makes it a proper choice for various projects.

MOST POPULAR HYBRID APP FRAMEWORKS

StackOverflow provides the opportunity to look at the detailed statistics of the different spheres of programming. As for the frameworks most used by IT developers, such statistics is also presented. In this survey, you can see which hybrid, front-end, and other frameworks are popular in the IT community. However, while speaking of the best hybrid app framework in 2022, we’re going to focus on such ones: Flutter, React Native, and Xamarin. So, among 33913 professional developers, 4000 use React Native, 2240 use Flutter, and 2040 for Xamarin.

There’s no better confirmation of the importance of using the best hybrid framework for mobile development than the examples of successful applications. As almost all of the hybrid apps are written with frameworks, let’s look at the list of solutions people use every day and probably have no clue they are hybrid, and what frameworks they use:

Google Ads (Flutter)
Cryptochange(Ionic)
BMW (Flutter)
Untappd(Ionic)

Some of these apps use Flutter, React Native, or Xamarin as the best hybrid app frameworks. The presented list is far not complete but it is enough to illustrate the power of frameworks for hybrid app development.

BEST HYBRID FRAMEWORKS FOR MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT

For your project success, it is important to make the right choice among our contestants for the right to be named as the best hybrid app development framework in 2022. Considering all the possible options is essential.

For this, in the previous paragraph, there was provided statistics about the usage of various frameworks but now we’re going to focus on the three successful frameworks for hybrid app development.
Flutter – Fastest Evolving Framework for Hybrid App Development
Flutter was originally made for Android development but a bit later, it was transformed into a popular hybrid framework with the support of the two main mobile platforms: Android and iOS.

The fact that it provides a great user experience on both operating systems makes it one of the best frameworks for hybrid mobile app development. Initially, Flutter was created mostly for mobile development but later, it started to expand towards web development, and then, desktop apps could be created with it. However, despite the undoubted versatility of this new big thing from Google, it is most commonly used as a hybrid framework exactly for mobile app building.

Our Flutter app development company considers this advanced tool the best hybrid app framework in 2022 for various reasons. Here are the main advantages of it:

Good documentation allows arising specialists to successfully learn it from scratch
Updates are thoroughly tracked by Google to provide a gradual learning curve
It is free and open-source
Time-effective due to the fact that it doesn’t use the native UI and UX APIs, and instead it allows you to draw your own interface right on the screen. The only downside of this approach is that each time when the updates for the native UIs are released, Flutter has to come up with them as well
Cross-platform. It allows programmers to use a single codebase for different platforms
Easy testing and maintenance due to the previous point
Spectacular design. Apps created with Flutter are not only highly functional but also don’t have the restrictions of the UI/UX visuals which is often the case with older frameworks like React Native The versatility of this most popular hybrid app framework confirms that Flutter is a reasonable choice for different kinds of projects.

The immaturity of this framework is one more advantage. From the employer’s perspective, the main benefit is that the young minds are into this technology, thus, hiring them will be highly progressive. For those who want to master some new skills, Flutter is also a good choice because of a smaller number of competitors in the labor market.
React Native
React Native is one of the oldest hybrid frameworks for mobile app development, which has gained its place as the most popular one among IT specialists. It is built over the JSX, which is the extension to JS. This hybrid framework was created by Facebook in 2013 and at once shared on GitHub. Since then, React Native’s trend never decreased, which is not surprising considering that it is backed up by Samsung and Microsoft.

React Native is considered one of the best frameworks for hybrid app development due to such features:

High performance
A huge supportive community of developers. This hybrid framework is free and open-source, which automatically makes it more popular
React Native supports live and hot reloading. These concepts differ a little bit but it is not very important right now. In simple words, both of them allow the coder to view changes without recompiling the code each time
Cost-effective solution
Modular architecture is used in React Native. It means that the code is divided into exact group what eases the updating and debugging process for the other coders working on the project
It is based on JavaScript, which is, in turn, considered the most popular programming language in 2022
It provides a responsive UI, which results in a great user experience

Xamarin
While looking for the best hybrid framework for mobile development, it is necessary to name Xamarin, even despite the fact that it is a bit on the downside now. It was once an independent company but was later bought by Microsoft, and since then, has been maintained by it. It is extremely powerful due to having been built on C #. Being a hybrid framework a priori means cost-effectiveness as there is no need to write additional code for another platform. However, let’s look at the other advantages of Xamarin:

Powerful design tools are provided by Xamarin thus, impressive UIs are created
It is built over a flexible object-oriented trusted C #, thus, is easy to master for .NET developers
Great integration with various libraries unlike, for example, React Native
A perfect fit for writing offline applications
Ability to use a Xamarin.Forms integrated framework. It is a tool that makes it needless for a developer to learn all the native UIs. It allows seeing how the app will look at the exact platform
Cloud app testing is available

FLUTTER – THE BEST HYBRID APP FRAMEWORK IN 2022

It is important to choose the best hybrid app framework in 2022. Flutter application development services are gaining the top positions. It is now a growing trend, developed and maintained by Google, which already makes it highly trusted and reliable. Let’s look at some more specific advantages of Flutter.

Firstly, every element in Flutter is a widget, which makes everything in the future app totally customizable. It means that you have full control over every element in an application.

Secondly, it uses a Skia graphic 2D library, which is open-source. It provides a lot of APIs for various platforms. Skia is a graphic engine for such software as Chrome OS, Google Chrome, Android, and others. This engine results in extremely high performance. It is also very fast and enables to create very smooth animations over 60 fps.

Thirdly, Flutter is highly productive. It saves a lot of time for recompiling codes to see the changes due to such a feature as Hot Reload. It allows changing a fragment of code and instantly seeing how it results in an application. In addition, it uses Dart that is quite similar to many widely known object-oriented languages, which makes it easier to learn.

Fourthly, the fact that Flutter is open-source, you can anytime access the original source code to see how anything in your code was written originally by the team of programmers to make it look and function the way it does. It leads to your ability to customize even those elements which are not expected to be customizable. But with Flutter, you can just copy a part of the source code and change it the way you want.

Big brands want their apps to be available on different platforms. It means that keeping their quality high is not that easy as the maintenance, testing, running, etc. has to be performed for multiple apps on multiple platforms. The best hybrid app framework in 2022 – Flutter, solves these problems due to its high performance, security, theming opportunities, huge supportive community, and others. What’s more interesting about it, is that it’s not going to stop at mobile development. It is already developing in the direction of web and desktop development, which means only bigger prospects for employers as well as for developers.

Needless to say that Flutter is way more flexible than other frameworks including both React Native and Xamarin. They sometimes slow the development because of the need to engage native developers or learn some native languages on your own. The reason is that they don’t provide all the needed functionality to avoid this, unlike Flutter, which allows building apps of any difficulty with the pure Dart.

IN CONCLUSION

It is clear from the article that choosing the best hybrid app framework in 2022 is an extremely important stage in the overall development process. A lot of further processes including implementation, maintenance, debugging, updating, etc. depend on the chosen framework. We’ve looked closely at the three most popular frameworks for hybrid app development: Flutter, React Native, and Xamarin. Each of them has different characteristics and features and is a perfect fit for an exact project, so to choose the best hybrid framework for mobile development, it is necessary to look at its advantages as well as its downsides. Such an approach, in the long run, will save your time and budget.

The article about Best Hybrid App Framework In 2022 is also published here.

IoT in Healthcare: Use Cases, Trends, Advantages

Helen — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 13:39:18 +0000

It is hard to overestimate the place of IoT in healthcare these days. Smart devices, wearables and the overall level of connectivity and innovations in modern medical equipment have changed the industry forever. And definitely for the best. In this piece, you’ll find a comprehensive answer to the majority of questions you can have about the state of IoT in healthcare.

A PLACE OF IOT IN HEALTHCARE

To say that modern medicine is striving would be a moderate expression. The progress accelerates every day ‘without any remorse’, transforming all known medical practices. Global healthcare evolves based on the latest achievements of the planet’s greatest minds and amazing prospects of autonomous, self-learning tech solutions.

Along with such rapid development, however, comes a strict necessity to keep up with the pace. The good thing is that all medical fields are either looking to or already go hand in hand with advanced technologies – from diagnostics to therapeutics, from pediatrics to complex surgery.
Technologies are numerous – artificial intelligence, machine learning – you name it. But what particular tech concept or combination of concepts can provide sufficient monitoring and managing powers such an evergrowing, global niche requires? The answer may be found in the Internet of Things or IoT. Despite the concept’s relatively young age, it’s already become closely entangled with healthcare. So much that it’s commonly coined as the Internet of Medical Things.

Extensive centralization and interconnection capacities the IoT tech provides are difficult to overestimate. It brings health monitoring, remote treatment, hospital physical and digital infrastructure organization to a whole new level. But let’s ponder on IoT powers in healthcare in a bit more detail.

IOT APPLICATIONS IN HEALTHCARE

The Internet of Things allows setting up a centralized network of interconnected devices that can generate and exchange data within a single framework. All that data can also be tracked and gathered in real time, which provides a passive accumulation of analytics materials. In terms of enhancement for medical facilities, this means that a regular hospital can be turned into a smart hospital.

It is an advanced facility where everything is tracked and managed simultaneously while all the data is collected in a centralized database. Such tech features open a myriad of possibilities to improve the convenience, efficiency, and even budget-saving options of modern hospitals.

The advantages of IoT applications in healthcare don’t end there. The technology has a very diverse field of application in medicine. Let’s take a look at some major implementations.

IOT USE CASES IN HEALTHCARE

Remote patient monitoring
In 2018, NHS England – an ‘executive non-departmental public body of the Department of Health and Social Care’ announced that it’s willing to support a remote diabetes treatment solution. The statement was made on World Diabetes Day 2018. The solution is a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM). A device that is the size of a penny which monitors blood glucose level non-stop after it’s inserted in a patient’s arm.

The monitoring data can be easily accessed via your Android or iOS device. Mass-market instances of such products are Freestyle Libre and Eversense. Such smart health monitoring devices bring huge value to the research and treatment of diabetics.

Eversense continuous glucose monitoring sensor that can be implanted in the patient’s arm and lasts up to 90 days.

And in many other cases, remote capabilities (also called telehealth) may make the need to visit your local hospital practically obsolete. An excellent resolution for patients suffering from mobility issues.

Going deeper into the remote subject, the IoT network can connect and track practically any sensor inserted into a human body for medical purposes. This will help prevent cardiac arrests (MoMe Kardia from InfoBionic), all sorts of seizures, and provide medical help for critical patients just in time.

InfoBionic’s wearable cardinal tracker streams ECG and motion data to the doctor in real time.

Tracked ingestible sensors
The World Health Organization conducted a study in 2003 to find out that about 50% of prescribed medicines aren’t taken the right way or completely ignored. A prominent example of resolving this issue is the ingestible sensors solution developed by Proteus. These tiny sensors take place of a prescription and send a signal a receiving device upon dissolution in the stomach. An amazing advanced creation, Proteus’ ‘smart pills’ will surely help reduce the rates of incorrect, senseless consumption of highly important medical prescriptions. Now, this is what one can call a truly advanced drug management.

While being an advanced piece of medical technology, Porteus Smart Pills have the same tiny size as the actual pills.

There are also smart pills that feature tiny cameras, which allow conveniently visualizing the inside environment of one’s organism. PillCam from Medtronic is one example.

Mobile health
Also called mHealth, it’s the way of watching and taking care of one’s health via mobile can be a true life-saver for modern patients, practically all of whom use smartphones regularly. Mobile health is an emerging field that contributes heavily to both critical medical situations and regular treatment instances. As we’ve already mentioned in the ‘Remote patient monitoring’ section, mobile app development can serve as the management means for health tracking devices.

This is only a small portion of startups who are trying to gain market share with their mobile app. Source: www.cbinsights.com

Such apps can be used as your full-blown healthcare hub where you can access valuable medical info, analyze your organism behavior trends, manage other body-inserted IoT sensors, and contact your doctor with a single tap.

This is an especially valuable solution for underdeveloped countries of the world where people can’t afford regular visits to hospitals yet, most probably, have smartphones. And governments, in turn, get a capability to see how the population is doing in terms of health, accumulating massive statistics.

There are many apps already available on the market, ranging in functionality and purpose:

Medication management apps;
Fitness apps
Body, activity, & sleep tracking apps
Pregnancy monitoring apps
Individual health recording apps The list may go on. You can check it all out yourself on your OS-compatible mobile application market.

Smart hospitals
The dissatisfaction with flawed, difficult to manage hospital infrastructures is a common issue of a vast majority of the planet’s countries (even the developed ones). Colossal loads of paperwork, long and frustrating lines, and working overload most nurses and doctors experience – this is where the problem stems.

Practically all such situations can be turned around with the integration of IoT solutions. Huge, cumbersome paper registers can be replaced with an automated, centralized database, which can be additionally enhanced in terms of reliability with blockchain and smart contracts; a single management system can receive submissions, help optimally control queues, and track staff members via their smartphones; all the equipment can also be remotely monitored and managed (e.g., shut down in unprecedented cases).

Such innovations can help greatly reduce in-house costs for hospitals, preserve forests, and make both patients’ and medical staff’s lives easier. The overall productivity will also increase due to the automated smart solutions’ capability to immediately recognize health issues which would otherwise take months of live doctor diagnostics.

Enhanced chronic disease treatment
With IoT-powered wearables, sensors, data analytics, and mobile and web development opportunities, battling chronic diseases becomes more efficient and accessible. The thing is, recurring health issues must be monitored and analyzed over long periods of time. That way, trends in the disease fluctuations can be defined and juxtaposed in order to be most efficiently treated.

All that tech allows doing just that, with many additional capabilities provided by the integration of blockchain and AI on top of that. This is very important when it comes to health issues as difficult to understand and underexplored as the chronic ones.

CHALLENGES OF IOT IN HEALTHCARE

As much as the Internet of Medical Things seems to be revolutionary and highly-efficient, there are still some major challenges of IoT in healthcare this tech concept must overcome down the road. With large, game-changing integrations such as this one, there comes along a myriad of technical difficulties and adaptation issues. The main include:

Underdeveloped initiatives. Many IoMT initiatives directed at battling chronic diseases or other issues still need time to grow and develop. This technological niche as a whole must grow a lot in order to start providing regular enhancement results.
Possible lack of available memory. IoT sensors and devices can general colossal amounts of data, all of which is important and needs to be analyzed. This poses a question of huge data repositories that must hold all those volumes of info for indefinite terms.
Difficulties with regular updates. With so many hardware solutions comes as much software for powering and managing it all. This software must be timely updated in order to run smoothly and stay at its latest version. And here’s where constant updates will require lots of effort and might spawn many technical issues.
Personal sensitive data security. An IoT-powered medicine is a hardware-backed system that functions through the Internet. And online systems get hacked and breached. This spawns a chance of important private data being potentially undermined.
Global healthcare regulations. The IoMT still has to be approved by global healthcare regulatory bodies worldwide. This will take time and may keep many innovations at bay just because of some formalities.

ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF IOT IN HEALTHCARE

Considering the above-mentioned challenges of IoT in healthcare, there are, indeed, downsides as well as benefits when it comes to the medical IoT.

Advantages of IoT in healthcare
The ‘all-consuming’ connection of health devices and data centralization brings many significant benefits to the table, such as:

All-around technological enhancement. Rendering hospital visits unnecessary, passively accumulating and deeply analyzing important health data, etc. We’ve already pondered on all these advanced tech capacities galore enough. The IoMT provides space for fantastic long-term innovations.
Cost savings. One of the greatest advantages of IoT in healthcare is that efficient autonomous systems will cost less to manage and ‘employ’ in the long run. Things are even better when it comes to patient cost savings due to fewer hospital journeys as well as accelerated diagnostics and treatment.
Accessibility. Doctors can view all the necessary data on command and check real-time patient conditions without leaving their office due to telehealth software development.

Disadvantages of IoT in healthcare
Alternatively, some downsides that come along with the massive implementation of the IoT in healthcare include:

Privacy can be potentially undermined. As we’ve already mentioned, systems get hacked. Lots of attention will need to be focused on data security, which requires significant additional spendings.
Unauthorized access to centralization. There is a chance that dishonest interlopers may access centralized systems and realize some cruel intentions.
Global healthcare regulations. International health administrations are already issuing guidelines that must be strictly followed by governmental medical establishments integrating the IoT in their workflow. These may restrict possible capacities to some extent.

IOT TRENDS IN HEALTHCARE

There can be defined several IoMT trends implemented by majorities of startups worldwide.

Wearables continue to top the market. Major mobile technology providers like Apple and Android are enhancing and updating their authentic wearables, adding them with more health tracking features. And the rest of the world isn’t shy to follow the tendency, spawning numerous various-purpose mini devices.
Surgical robotics become a common reality. AI-powered, robotic surgical means show to be more precise than real doctors on more than one occasion. There are still limitations and risks involved, but the technology is definitely in the spotlight and is looking to become more widespread in the nearest future.
Integration of other prominent technologies with the IoT expands the horizon. AI, AR, Machine Learning, Big Data, blockchain, and smart contracts – all of that fuel up and expands the IoT powers even further. AI is already better and far more precise in predicting, for one instance, women’s breast cancer.

SUMMARY

Let us emphasize once more that the IoT can be nothing short of a revolution in the field as important on the global scale as healthcare. there are still many difficulties, peculiarities, and technological obstacles to overcome. And even though there are, currently, downsides as well as advantages to the concept, things seem to go very well for this technological innovation.

We are pretty confident that if you ask most medical professionals about their opinion on the subject, they will say that full IoMT integration and adaptation is the only logical way of development for advanced medicine of the future.

With that being said, enjoy the life-saving, health-improving fruits of the massive technological progress.

The article about IoT in Healthcare: Use Cases, Trends, Advantages is also published here.

Cloud Application Development: Trends and Technologies

Helen — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 07:58:28 +0000

Cloud application development is a necessity in a modern enterprise world. You can hardly find a company that has never used a cloud-based application or any of the SaaS products. Cloud applications are now dominating the market over desktop software for various reasons. The main advantage is they can be accessed at any time from anywhere with any device that has a web browser. Besides, when a company develops a cloud application, it automatically means that all users are working with the same version of the app. This greatly reduces the time and resources required for new features introduction, security updates, and synchronization.

We will look at the advantages of cloud application development later in the article. Now we’ll define the concept. A cloud application is software that is running on the remote server and accessed by the users via a web browser or local client, that serves as a user-interface for rendering the content that is processed in the cloud. Thus, a user’s device is used only to input the data, which is consequently sent to the server where it is processed and sent back to the user. Naturally, all the data is stored in the same cloud environment and can be accessed by all users that have permission.

Let’s name some reasons to use web-based solutions:

Quick implementation. In contrast to desktop applications, cloud apps are much easier to use as they don’t require any specific knowledge and skills from the users

Availability. Due to the great integration with various devices, you can access a cloud app anytime and from anywhere as long as you have a stable internet connection

Relatively easy maintenance. The thing is, in the case of cloud solutions, developers have to debug and update a single version in one environment that is shared for all users at the same time unlike, for example, desktop apps

Scalability and flexibility. Cloud solutions can provision their capacity in times of growing traffic trends, and lower it when the traffic descends. The use of cloud applications prevents enterprises from paying for highly capable servers even in off-peak times. Cloud services like AWS and Azure have PaaS solution for automated resources distribution so app owner won’t pay for the resources that are not used

STATE OF CLOUD APP DEVELOPMENT

The IT market is constantly changing so it’s important to keep track of the most popular technologies. StackOverflow survey provides detailed information about the most used scripting and markup languages. Among them, there are Java, Node.js, ASP.NET, and others used for back-end development. Another part of the survey gives us statistics about the most popular JavaScript frameworks used for front-end development.

As it was already mentioned, companies choose cloud application development to reduce costs, save time, and achieve high efficiency and high performance. Many IT industry giants launched their own PaaS (Platform as a Service) products to provide ISVs and enterprises with reliable and secure cloud hosting. The choice is wide and can address the needs of cloud application development at any scale. Moreover, all of them have their own advantages and killer features. The choice of the cloud services provider is as much important as a choice of a backend or frontend technology. Besides obvious things like the cost, it impacts how easily it will be for your DevOps to work with, how scalable the app will be, etc.

For example, historically, Azure better works with ASP.NET backend while AWS better works with Java EE and has better microservices support, such as Docker, which is essential for high-load Java web apps.

Here is the list of the most popular PaaS providers:

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Oracle Cloud
IBM Cloud
Google Cloud Platform
Heroku

This list may not seem very big as here are only the world-known giants. Listing less popular companies using the cloud would take an eternity. There are almost no companies left who haven’t preferred cloud services yet.

As for the technology stack, little has changed. JavaScript is holding the top position among web technologies, while Python, Java, and PHP are the leaders among the back-end programming languages. What about the innovations, such language as Dart, is becoming more and more popular. It is now in the list of the most used languages while in 2019 only 1% of programmers employed it, and in 2018, it wasn’t mentioned in any StackOverflow statistics at all. At the same time, Swift, Kotlin, Objective-C that were used before for native development, are losing their popularity due to the same survey.

TYPES OF CLOUD APPLICATIONS

While speaking about cloud application development, it is necessary to discuss three main software delivery models:

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

SaaS solutions are for the end-users. It means that once a SaaS product is built and set up, it is completely ready for customers to use. They receive a ready-made product accessible from any device as long as the Internet connection is stable. and are excellent for collaborative work. Examples: Google Docs, Google Drive.

PaaS applications are mostly development environments based on various execution environments, OS, and databases. They require the application code to be deployed by the developers, and the vendor performs all the other processes. PaaS enables fast development of scalable applications with easy private or public deployment. PaaS products include Heroku, Force.com, MS Azure, AWS, etc.

In the case of IaaS, what’s required from the customer is the middleware and support, while the vendor is responsible for data storage, virtualization, networking, and servers. A significant weakness of this option is that the customer is restricted to the provider’s tools for cloud application development. IaaS is employed by Google Compute Engine, Amazon EC2, and others.

CLOUD APP DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

SDLC stands for Software Development Life Cycle, and it is an indispensable part of the development process no matter what kind of software you create and what platform you develop for. Once a dedicated development team gets a task, the SDLC process begins. It implies a set of stages. Waterfall, Iterative, Agile are SDLC methodologies. Each of them affects the way the operations are performed but regardless of the model, the sequence of stages mostly stays the same.

To sum up, SaaS is for the end-users, PaaS is for the developers, and IaaS is most often used by system administrators.

Cloud application development lifecycle includes:

Requirement Analysis. At this point, development costs are estimated, and the schedule is set. In case some organizational problems appear, they are settled with the customers at once.
Design. This phase is based on the designers’ work. UI/UX specialists examine future program’s functionality in order to build an interface that will cover all features. After the work is done, they present it as mockups or wireframes.
Development. This is the longest stage where almost all of the coding is done. Programmers have to put received design layouts into the working application. IT specialists usually divide all work into small stages and perform tasks due to the beforehand set priority.
Testing. This stage covers the Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC). As well as SDLC, it includes a set of phases that QA specialists perform to deliver the final product. Here application codes are sent to the QA engineers who use specific methods to test and debug the program to make it work in a proper way.
Deployment. Here a ready-made program is delivered to the end-user and set up in a user’s environment. The deployment includes release, installation, activation, and version tracking.
Maintenance. This phase comes only after the software is sold. It aims at fixing all problems that pop up after the application release.

CLOUD DEVELOPMENT TECHNOLOGIES

Back-end Technologies

From year to year, the technology stack for backend development doesn’t change that much so let’s see what languages and tools take the leading positions.

.NET
.NET is a hybrid framework developed by Microsoft. It gives programmers the opportunity to work with different languages, libraries, and tools for building scalable web, mobile, and desktop applications. Among the languages .NET supports, there are C#, Visual Basic, and F#. It also has its own package manager – NuGet, which contains more than 90000 packages. .NET allows working with those cloud servers that already exist as well as creating and deploying your own. Thus, it is a powerful tool for cloud application development.

Java
Java is a mature versatile multipurpose programming language created back in 1995. During these years, Java has earned the trust of IT specialists all over the world. Object-oriented class-based language can be implemented in the cloud, mobile, desktop, and web application development. It has tons of advantages such as well-defined specifications, expected behavior, which results in reduced development time, a huge number of tools and libraries, the fact that Java apps can be run on any device regardless of its underlying architecture, and many others. Java is suitable for enterprise-level projects that require difficult computations and data processing. However, despite all the advantages, Java developers are rather expensive, and employing this language for the startup is considered unseemly.

PHP
PHP is designed for creating software in a great variety of domains. Because its code is processed on the web server with a specific interpreter, it makes PHP an excellent choice for custom cloud app development. It is most commonly employed for mid-sized projects or startups. It has a 5 million supportive community of developers, which will help you solve appearing problems on the stage of learning or later. By the way, quite clear documentation eases the learning process. The popularity of PHP results in a great number of potential specialists to hire, and for a relatively affordable price. As database integration is one of the key aspects of backend development, it makes PHP one of the best options as it connects to a wide range of databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, and others. In addition, hosting services for PHP are quite cheap because the components that a PHP app uses (MySQL database, HTTP server, etc.) are free.

Node.js
Node.js is an open-source runtime environment that executes JavaScript codes. Its specificity is in unifying the whole software development process around a single language – JavaScript instead of using numerous technologies for back- and front-end. Filling the gap between server and client-side saves such important resources as time and money. Node.js allows building highly scalable applications with great performance. It is especially great for creating high-traffic enterprise apps including demanding games or chats. It has a wide range of frameworks that eases the work. One more thing that makes Node.js extremely popular among aspiring developers is that it is quite easy to learn, especially considering a large supportive community.

RoR
Ruby on Rails is an application framework used for backend development. It targets simple development. It is relatively easy to master due to the English-like syntax and understandable documentation. This simplicity results in minimized development time. High readability leads to easier updates and maintenance, which, in turn, makes RoR development extremely cost-effective. In addition, Ruby on Rails has many testing frameworks cut out exactly for it, which makes testing faster and easier.

Front-end technologies

Angular
One of the most popular JavaScript frameworks is Angular. It was released in 2016 but its quality has already been recognized in the IT community. It is built on the basis of TypeScript by the same team that created AngularJS in 2010. In contrast to its predecessor, Angular has easier component-based architecture as well as JavaScript, its system is more modular, and it enables asynchronous compilations. However, this technology is not often chosen by aspiring specialists as the learning curve might be a little complicated in spite of good documentation and a supportive community. The fact that Google uses Angular itself in such solutions as Google Cloud Platform, or AdWords, proves its quality.

React
React.js, simply called React, is an open-source framework, especially popular for cloud application development. It is a JavaScript library that is initially designed for building single-page solutions. It was created by Facebook in 2013 and was at once employed in the Facebook newsfeed and Instagram. React aims at being simple, still fast, and highly scalable. Its specificity is reusable UI components, which save a lot of time and energy for rebuilding the whole application if something goes wrong. As for time saving, it also provides server-side rendering without updating the page. In addition, React has a smooth learning curve unlike some other JS frameworks, which makes it easy to learn for those who have тever worked with JavaScript.

Vue.js
Vue.js is one more open-source JavaScript framework created in 2014 by Evan You. It is a solid option for cloud app development, single-page solutions, or website building. The fact that its component library is based on HTML/CSS/JS makes Vue.js extremely easy to master as every web and cloud developer has definitely worked with these three core technologies. The documentation of high quality also eases the process of learning. It is also highly flexible. This provides the possibility to build SPAs (single page applications) as well as some individual interactive components that can be easily integrated with the help of some other technology.

IN CONCLUSION

Choosing cloud development is reasonable, as it will result in fast, scalable, and secure applications with high performance. The fact that it’ll help save time and costs is also a key factor while deciding on an application type. The approach to development has changed for the better and became easier due to the innovative tools, technologies, and versatile SDLC methodologies. After you’ve decided on the technology stack, product features, team composition, and SDLC model, the cloud application development process begins.

This article about Cloud Application Development is also published here.

How to Approach Custom Web App Development?

Helen — Fri, 18 Jun 2021 12:24:12 +0000

Web presence is the number one requirement for any software product. The wide variety of tools and advancing new frameworks moved custom web app development to the next level and made it as accessible as never before. Innovative approaches are getting popular at full speed. Both businesses and developers could benefit from fast, simple, and efficient coding processes and maintenance. In this article, we will wrap up the most important details on custom web app development, including its architecture, available technologies, SDLC models, and best practices in 2021.

CUSTOM WEB APP DEVELOPMENT: TECH OPPORTUNITIES

The last decade has presented a number of technological opportunities in the software building process. A variety of tools and frameworks are changing the existing approaches irrevocably. Custom web app development is being advanced and supported by different businesses and developers themselves. According to the statistics, the average organization is using approximately 29 different web applications during the common daily process.
Companies have named the top 5 reasons to choose cloud solutions: speed improvements, flexibility, business continuity, customer support, and lower cost. Source: idg.com
The fast-growing network dev communities work on both enhancing existing approaches and developing new ones. Instead of creating and supporting separate versions like a desktop app, iOS, and Android mobile apps, businesses can invest in cloud solutions with responsive designs. It is less resource-consuming since the web app development process can be much faster and easier. Consequently, only the U.S. market predicts a 26 percent increase in the number of web developers between 2018 and 2028.
Huge companies such as Alphabet, Facebook, Dropbox, Hubspot, Amazon were among the first to deliver custom web app development services. They have greatly benefited from the boosted performance and provided an excellent user experience for their customers.
It also enables automated data exchange and process integration across different ecosystems. Custom web application developers work on continuous functionality extension prioritizing business requirements.
Better user experience, the cost decrease, reasonable timeframes will become beneficial for everyone. Companies that have the software product can advance it with the help of the cloud version and so can do new businesses. Custom web app development is the best choice so far. In both cases, it aims at providing the best functionality with an eye to the future. Let’s consider the most common requirements during the coding process.

UP-TO-DATE CLOUD APP ARCHITECTURE

Choosing the right cloud app architecture is an essential step in the overall web app development process. It maintains the necessary communications between the user interface and structural components. The cloud app architecture diagram reflects the major interactions within the network software.
In short, the entire process starts with the user command sent to the online server via the Internet. It will forward the request to the required server which can process it. The following step is that the cloud app passes the processed data to the server that presents obtained results to the user.
In order to make the web app development process smoother and faster, developers have applied various types of cloud app architecture. Web app specialists always balance between innovative approaches and reasonable solutions for the project needs. Their task is to build an appropriate cloud app architecture that enables continual and fast interactions between all the components. Here are some of the common approaches.

Server-side HTML cloud app architecture

It is one of the oldest approaches where the server generates HTML content and sends it to one URL as a full-fledged page. As for advantages, such architecture patterns can be applied to different server languages and frameworks. There isn’t any need for additional security tools as it is usually provided by the server-side.
However, the approach is limited and can’t provide high performance and great usability. Streaming a huge amount of data between the server and the user usually takes some time. Moreover, there aren’t any abilities for real-time updates and offline work that is only supported by HTML5.

JS generation widgets(AJAX)

The main advantage is that the displayed page will consist of widgets. The requested data is uploaded by means of AJAX query, JSON, HTML chunks, or JavaScript templates. All the widgets function separately and particular changes won’t influence the whole page, which makes the whole custom web app development process much easier.
It decreases the response time and improves usability as the data is being transferred only to a specific widget. Developers usually need to apply additional mechanisms like Hash-Bang for linkability, server-side technologies in web service, and JavaScript frameworks on the user side.

Single-page application

That is a dynamic approach that enables smooth, fast, and real-time interactions in the cloud app architecture. Updates occur within the existing page with no need for the whole page loading. Users can interact with the particular page while the requested content is generated. Such pattern delivers the page communication via AJAX, XML, Asynchronous JavaScript, JSON or HTML elements. The applied pattern has greatly improved the user experience and allows page adjustments without reloading. Therefore, this pattern is widely chosen for increased usability and performance.
In any case, we have to acknowledge that choosing up-to-date cloud app architecture will result in better performance, great scalability, and fast delivery. Therefore, the single-page app is considered the most innovative and efficient approach.
We also suggest reading the article about web application architecture covering details on cloud app and web server architecture. Combining different approaches and varying web server architecture structures will help to improve the overall response to user requests.

SERVER-SIDE TECHNOLOGIES FOR CUSTOM WEB APP DEVELOPMENT

The next step to consider is the choice of server-side technologies that can be used by the programmers in order to deliver the best web app development services. According to statistics, most of the market share belongs to PHP, Node.js, ASP.NET, Java, and Ruby on Rails. Depending on the final decision, companies have the possibility to improve such important criteria in custom web app development as scalability, security, maintainability, project cost, etc. Therefore, we’ve prepared some important details on each of these technologies.
Server-side technologies market share. Source: datanyze.com

PHP

PHP is an open-source programming language that has existed for more than 25 years and has a supportive community of over 5 million developers. Developers acknowledge that this language is compatible with various servers and suitable for most cloud apps. As they apply the interpreted code, it might lead to slower performance when dealing with heavy files.
However, this language is known for its great horizontal scalability that distributes the workload between servers. As for security, the developers have to consider more approaches in addition to just in-build security features. In short, this is a flexible programming language that can meet the basic needs of custom software development. Companies favor it for the ability to choose between hosting services, lower maintenance expenses, and developers’ availability.

ASP.NET

ASP.NET is a network application framework that is greatly supported by Microsoft. It entered the market in the 2000s but today’s community already consists of 60.000 developers. ASP.NET web software development is characterized by all the necessary functionality: fast performance due to the compiled code, vertical scalability, support for all authentication protocols, numerous libraries. This framework turned out to become the most reasonable and up-to-date solution for custom web app development. It offers the greatest functionality and the least expenses in regards to the infrastructure.

Node.js

Node.js is an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine that was released in 2009. This is the latest technology that advances the event model further with a non-blocking I/O approach. Such an approach makes it efficient and lightweight. It aims at consistency, flexibility, and of course reliability. Node.js is a great choice for user-friendly and robust cloud apps. The architecture supports code sharing and reusability similarly to the Java-based approach.

Ruby on Rails

RoR is an open-source website framework that obtains powerful and rich APIs. It targets simple development with more productivity. The initial release was in 2005 and today’s community numbers 1.9 million specialists worldwide. It is often used to build scalable web applications as developers apply the interpreted code with no need for compilation. It is often used to build scalable network apps. The overall custom web app development process isn’t that time-consuming as it requires less coding and testing. The main advantage of Ruby on Rails is that developers should favor convention over configuration.

Java

Java is an object-oriented programming language that has been on the market for more than two decades. Its community has grown to a number of 7.6 million developers. This language is easy to learn and the development process is supported by different Java IDEs like Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, etc. It’s common for developers to various tools and frameworks for layered architecture. Since Java code is backward compatible and runs inside a web container on the server, it could be simply migrated between different operating systems. However, security remains the main concern for Java developers. Being one of the first server-side technologies, it’s getting harder to compete with the new market players.
Along with considering the mentioned criteria, companies usually draw attention to innovative technologies in custom software development. Their choice is driven by the framework stability and community support. We’d like to emphasize the fact that the market demand for ASP.NET and Node.js has constantly increased in a short period. Up-to-date functionality at a reasonable cost is among the main reasons to choose these server-side technologies. Both ASP.NET and Node.js are great options for projects of different complexity.

JAVASCRIPT FRAMEWORKS FOR CUSTOM WEB APP DEVELOPMENT

The market presents a great variety of UI technologies to maintain the web app development process on a high level. Whereas Javascript frameworks have sharply increased in popularity, the developers would still make a choice for the ones that can anticipate arising trends and keep their leading positions for the long-term period. At present the most market share is divided between three JS frameworks – React, Vue.js and Angular. UI development approaches are quite dynamic and changeable. The recent UI trends set high requirements that can be only met by the most innovative software building approaches.
JavaScript technologies popularity. Source: stackoverflow.com

React

React is a UI framework developed and supported by Facebook. Its popularity is growing extremely fast due to a number of provided advantages. Virtual DOM advances the overall user experience and simplifies the developers’ work. They have the ability to apply reusable components and build stable code with the help of one-direction data flow. It offers excellent backward compatibility. The learning curve is relatively longer however it’s worth getting acquainted. Improvement speed is impressive and they keep on presenting the additional development tools on a constant basis.

Vue.js

Vue.js is a JS framework for creating user interfaces without additional extensions. It offers a clear and simple approach that is supported by detailed documentation. It is often used for separate components as well as single-page apps. At the same time, Vue.js remains quite flexible and can be combined with other libraries. Nevertheless, the community keeps on growing, it’s still among the smallest ones on the market.

Angular

Angular is the JavaScript framework that was rewritten from AngularJS. The Google team has presented an original solution for network development with new features and logic. As for the programming language, developers apply TypeScript with its distinct features like async/await, arrow functions, class syntax, etc. Moreover, this UI framework remains compiled to Javascript and works with component-based architecture. Despite the fact that Google focuses on providing high performance and delivers strong support for the community, the learning curve might be quite complex due to component management, dependency injections, etc. Another thing is that Angular still deals with migrating the legacy systems from AngularJS and works on providing more detailed CLI documentation.
The final choice will be quite evident. React has been named the best JS framework for the last several years. Providing one-direction data flow in comparison with two-way data binding (Angular) or both options with default one-way binding(Vue.js), React definitely takes a higher market position. It is much easier to work and carry out maintenance. Another advantage is the number of available specialists on the market that are proficient with this JavaScript framework.

CUSTOM WEB APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT CYCLE

Like any other SDLC model, the web application development cycle will not be an exception here. It has to go through all the required stages and meet the initial purposes of the project. Early-stage development supports the proceeding steps while omitting some of them results in unexpected consequences. Being attentive to details and following the regulations helps to balance between high quality and increased productivity.
Here are some fundamentals of the custom web application development cycle. Firstly, it has to go through the following stages: the requirements outline, time and budget estimate, design and conception, coding, testing, deployment, and post-production. Secondly, it’s worth remembering that these stages are tightly related and require effort and certain resources including time, workforce, and cost.
Starting with the requirements analysis, the company needs to outline the final goals covering functionality and necessary documentation. With the help of these details, it is possible to classify tasks and perform a complexity analysis to estimate the approximate timeline and budget.
Moreover, the conception stage provides the development guide and design details to order the tasks and identify their dependency. Only after this development itself starts with following all the flow regulations outlined previously. Testing is usually performed in parallel to minimize bugs and get the product ready for the user acceptance test. Sometimes deployment is considered the final stage as it deals with the software release on the market. However, there is the last but not the least stage – post-production.
Let’s focus more on this moment as continuous maintenance and support are among the top criteria. In order to advance user experience, it is important to learn the application behavior in a real environment, analyze the user feedback and work on updates. From the overall experience in web app development, the most successful projects have been performed by the means of continuous SDLC models.

They target at gradual execution of each stage to the full extension. For instance, the Agile methodology relies upon addressing complicated tasks while delivering productivity through every step. It is a great solution for companies that are interested in offering web app development services, optimized according to the users’ needs. New solutions are supported via flexible iterations.
This model requires only initial planning while the rest will base on received experience and newly defined requirements. As long as the company considers a moderately small project with a stable definition, they can apply the Waterfall methodology where the stages are going in order and usually presenting the expected results. Due to the fact that the custom web app development process is sophisticated and time-consuming, we suggest using Agile methodology. The good point is that it’s suitable for both new and ongoing projects.

WEB DEVELOPMENT TEAM COMPOSITION

It is important to understand the significance of setting an effective custom web application development team. Assigned specialists need to be fully engaged in the SDLC and open for collaboration with other team members. Covering the needs of the process, the custom software development company has to establish great management, carry out business analysis, create UI/UX design, focus on professional software building with up-to-date technologies, test and deploy the cloud app in both staging and production environments. In order to arrange those workflows, the typical composition of a web dev team would consist of a product owner, a project manager, a business analyst, UI/UX designers, back-end and front-end developers, QAs. We’ve compiled the list of the common responsibilities for each team member.
Depending on the app complexity, the company could vary the number of required specialists. For example, they can arrange internal teams of custom web application developers. Usually, it can be a team of 1 senior front-end specialist, 1 back-end specialist, and 3-4 junior/mid ones. In such cases, the juniors can deal with the basic tasks while seniors look for advanced solutions. Companies have to consider the fact that the right team composition is the main tool to deliver successful network apps within reasonable timeframes.

IN CONCLUSION

Custom web app development isn’t just a current market trend, it has proven such popularity by delivering functionality and flexibility. Both companies and developers favor fast service delivery, reduced resource waste, improved customer support, and business continuity. Up-to-date technologies and SDLC models have simplified engineering as never before. The availability of efficient server-side and UI technologies enables innovative approaches. Whenever companies decided on the cloud app, they need to cover the following aspects:

Define product ideas and requirements.
Outline the project complexity. There is always room for improvement so definitely consider the scalability of the cloud app.
Make a choice of server-side and JS frameworks. ASP.NET and Node.js are considered the best choice for the backend and React for the frontend at present.
Choose cloud app architecture. The up-to-date structure can be delivered by the right combination of cloud app and web server architectures.
Set up the custom web application development team, covering management, business analysis, design, back-end, and front-end work, testing.
Apply the appropriate SDLC model. The Agile methodology would deliver continuous implementation within the best productivity.

We hope that our article has helped to find out more about custom web app development and suggested fresh ideas for future implementation.
This article about Custom Web Applications Development is also published here

Node.js Backend Development: Features, Benefits

Helen — Tue, 11 May 2021 15:22:25 +0000

Node.js backend development has become extremely popular among software developers. In order to keep up with modern technologies, it is necessary to know what is Node.js, what are the reasons to use it, where to hire developers, etc. Answers to these questions will be discovered in this article.

Node.js back-end development is nothing new and you can find its implementation in many products like Netflix or PayPal. It has many advantages, which make it suitable for both enterprise and B2C applications and is popular among the software engineering community. But what makes it so attractive from both technology and business points? In this article, we’ll try to answer this question.

There are probably no programmers in the whole world who are not familiar with the concept of JavaScript. Its popularity has risen significantly, and some tasks in web development we couldn’t even imagine doing some years ago, are now easy to perform with JavaScript. JS is a default choice and having the backend technology that is also powered by JavaScript is a great way to speed up development, make it more time, and cost-effective via the unification of the codebase.

If you are familiar with programming, which you most likely are, you’ve definitely heard about Node.js backend development. Anyway, to avoid any confusion, let’s state that Node.js is a so-called framework, a runtime environment for running JavaScript code on the back of a browser, or outside of it. JS, as a programming language, has drastically changed web development and has been successfully used by IT specialists all over the world since 1995.

It begs the question, what has made Node.js so popular and actively used among programmers? First of all, despite the fact that JS has always had many great frameworks and libraries, it never had any backend platforms, which were able to compete with other entrenched languages. Node.js has solved this issue, and a big number of startups and enterprise-level projects now use it for various purposes.

The researchers state that using Node.js for backend and other tasks is able to enhance their applications’ performance. This claim has become so popular in the IT-sphere that many programmers decided to change their codes’ languages to Node.js. This may be caused by the fact that many giants like NASA, Twitter, Microsoft, and others use it.

What Is Node.js Used For?

We already stated that Node.js is used for writing in JS but let’s clarify this concept a little bit. A runtime environment covers the category of software that allows programmers to write and edit code for future applications and run them. Different sources give us different definitions of Node.js but all of them say, in simple words that it is a platform used for building apps in JavaScript.

To realize the main conception of Node.js better, let’s look at its principal characteristics:

-It is a server framework
-Free license technology
-Suitable for different platforms
Node.js server-side processes are operated in such order:

1.You set a task to a server
2.The task is sent to the file system
3.The system is waiting for the request
4.When it is sent, and the file is processed, the content is sent to the user by the system

Why Is Node.js Good For the Backend?

Now, when the perception of Node.js itself is clear, what is left is to figure out what backend development with Node.js constitutes. Speaking of web engineering, the backend of your app is perhaps the most significant part thus IT specialists should pay enough attention to it and use the best solutions to make it work properly. There are many benefits of Node.js for backend development that we’ll look at closely in this article. But firstly, let’s list the main competitors of Node.js among backend languages and frameworks.

PHP
PHP is widely used by programmers for backend development. It is most suitable for mid-sized projects but is also good enough for large ones. Numerous successful projects are made exactly with PHP. Its architecture is event-driven, which makes real-time connections impossible. However, it still heads many listings of programming languages due to its great supportive community.

Python
Python is considered extremely easy to learn. Probably it makes it so popular among aspiring programmers. It is typically used for both mid-sized and large projects. Although Python does not always enable great performance, it can be easily solved with PyPy implementation. Generally, creating projects with Python is fast, productive, and has a great outcome.

Ruby
Ruby is fit for small and mid-sized projects. It has clear documentation and a huge community that makes it so actively used among developers. However, in recent years Ruby and RoR framework, in particular, have significantly dropped their market share and which is the most important – popularity among the community, which means fewer updates and new implementations.

Java
Java is considered a multipurpose programming language. The availability of numerous frameworks makes it even more demanded. It has a good reputation among IT specialists. Java development is good for large enterprise projects that require complex computations and difficult data processing.

.NET
.NET is a powerful Microsoft framework that has a wide range of languages that are suitable for both backend and frontend development. Most effective .NET development is for small and medium-sized projects. .NET is free and works on different platforms, it supports services, website, and desktop development.

Other Cases Of Node.js Use

Many people think that Node.js is used only for web development but there are many other spheres where the best apps are developed with Node.js. Here are some examples:

1.Package management. It is a collection of tools for installing, configuring and removing programs from the personal computer. Many easy-to-use package managers are built with Node.js (NPM, Yarn, Bower, and others);

2.I/O bound applications. As Node.js was just created, it was often used for working with I/O subsystems. Increasing their speed, you automatically increase I/O bound programs’ performance;

3.Command-line tools are easy to build with Node.js because of Node.js’ strong ecosystem, which means that among all possible packages of Node.js, some of them were originally created to help programmers build high-quality command-line tools;

4.Development tools cover compilers, GUI builders, debuggers, and others. As for ones, built with Node.js, they include web pack for module management, gulp, or grunt for task automation, jslint or eslint for debugging, etc.

As you can see, Node.js development covers much more spheres than web development including the backend. In addition, with the Node.js framework, even desktop applications can be created.

Node.js Frameworks

In spite of Node.js’ growing popularity, there are still some tasks, which are difficult to perform with it. Thus, many frameworks have been introduced to ease the work. Let’s look at the most popular ones:

Nest.js is an advanced Node.js framework that enables building scalable and effective backend software. Nest.js is suitable for enterprise-level projects due to its wide range of libraries, implementing TypeScript, MVP, and combining principles of OOP, FP, and FRP;

Express.js always holds on the top spot of Node.js frameworks ratings due to its quickness, minimalistic design, a powerful collection of HTTP helpers, and other features. Express.js is especially popular for those who don’t have the opportunity to contribute to the lengthy and costly process of development. Express.js is good for building web and mobile applications, and APIs;

Socket.io is easy to use on different devices as it has a user-friendly API. It is focused on two-way real-time flows, and supports automatic reconnection, multiplexing, binary, and others;

Meteor.js allows creating quality software with Node.js as it includes entrenched frontend frameworks. It provides dynamic imports, real-time features, great integration between frontend and backend, protection from hidden APIs;

Koa.js is built by Express.js creators, and really recalls it but they still have some differences. Koa.js is faster and more expressive. It uses async functions and promises to ease the errors’ handling process and enhance the apps’ performance;

Loopback.io allows developers to develop an API in a matter of minutes because it provides various features that ease the working process. It supports ad-hoc queries, storage service, etc., and is also compatible with various REST services and many common databases;

Feathers.io is a Node.js framework on the basis of Express.js. It allows writing real-time web apps and REST APIs with little effort. It is compatible with many frontend frameworks, supports various optional plugins, etc.

Among these frameworks, anyone can find the best Node.js framework that will address a specific project’s requirements and convey the best results.

Advantages of Node.js Backend Development

We’re clear now about Node.js’ major characteristics, and what is left is to answer the question, is Node.js good for the backend and why use Node.js.

JS has gained great popularity for web engineering many years ago already but now its capabilities have grown even much with the help of Node.js backend framework. So now, with JS it is possible to build both server- and client-side applications with the same code. In addition, by using some frameworks like Electron, for example, it’s easy to create even software for desktop.

Node.js is great for real-time working with a large amount of information. Also, as HTTP requests and responses are basically a stream of large files, Node.js enables collecting and visualizing data as dashboards. For example, GraphQL can be used for this purpose. It works along with many programming languages but exactly Node.js made GraphQL a new standard. Generally, Node.js backend development is so concise because it provides many features that are impossible with other event-based environments.

Alongside, Node.js is very fast, keeps data in native JSON, has a huge supportive community of developers, performs data streaming on the highest level, is sponsored by Linux Foundation, provides excellent hosting options, and is suitable for developing software for various platforms.

Node.js Performance: How Using Node.js Can Enhance The Apps’ Performance?

Speaking of Node.js advantages, many people first of all mention the lower cost of development and increased developers’ productivity. However, these are not all the pros. What is much more important is that applications’ performance benefits greatly from using exactly Node.js for the projects. There are such reasons for it:

1.Node.js succeeds at multitasking because it is non-blocking, and provides async functions;
2.It speeds up the server activity due to the previous point (processes are being handled in one thread instead of queueing);
3.The V8 Chrome engine that is considered the fastest one for JavaScript is used for Node.js

Applications’ performance depends on many factors and using Node.js covers many of them, that’s why applications in Node.js are more scalable and have higher performance.

The Popularity of Node.JS Among IT Companies

In this article, we’ve considered the ups and downs of Node.js backend development, and in addition, here is the survey, according to which Node.js holds on the top spot of the frameworks used by the development companies due to its excellent characteristics.

Who Uses Node.js?

Accepting the obvious Node.js advantages, it’s worth mentioning that many giants in the IT-sphere have been performing backend development with Node.js, which has led them to the great performance of their applications, and hence, to the growing popularity. Among the magisterial companies that use Node.js:
Microsoft
Uber
PayPal
Amazon
BMW
Netflix
eBay
Intel
And this is not a complete list. There are many more well-known companies that dealt with Node.js backend development but it may take hours to name them all. This list confirms the fact that Node.js can be successfully used for small projects as well as for enterprise-grade applications.

In Conclusion

Now, when we’ve figured out why it is considered a good practice to assemble a forward-thinking team, let’s clarify why it is much easier to do with Node.js backend developers. As Node.js is practically JS, which is known by most IT specialists, there will be no gap between the front – and backend development. Therefore, the borders will smoothen and allow any participant of the team to pay certain attention both to the client- and server-side.

DEV Community: Helen

Benefits of cloud-based clinic management software

Enhanced accessibility and convenience

Real-time collaboration across departments

Effortless scalability

Advanced security and compliance

Personalized experience for every user

Cost-effective and flexible

Automatic updates and continuous improvement

Simplified maintenance and provider support

Conclusion

Continuous Delivery in Software Development

WHAT IS SOFTWARE CONTINUOUS DELIVERY?

BENEFITS OF CONTINUOUS DELIVERY

Lower costs

Low-risk releases

Faster time to market

Happier team

Better products

Higher quality

HOW TO IMPLEMENT CONTINUOUS SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

CONCLUSION

Best Hybrid App Framework In 2022

WHAT IS HYBRID MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT

MOST POPULAR HYBRID APP FRAMEWORKS

BEST HYBRID FRAMEWORKS FOR MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT

FLUTTER – THE BEST HYBRID APP FRAMEWORK IN 2022

IN CONCLUSION

IoT in Healthcare: Use Cases, Trends, Advantages

A PLACE OF IOT IN HEALTHCARE

IOT APPLICATIONS IN HEALTHCARE

IOT USE CASES IN HEALTHCARE

CHALLENGES OF IOT IN HEALTHCARE

ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF IOT IN HEALTHCARE

IOT TRENDS IN HEALTHCARE

SUMMARY

Cloud Application Development: Trends and Technologies

STATE OF CLOUD APP DEVELOPMENT

TYPES OF CLOUD APPLICATIONS

CLOUD APP DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

CLOUD DEVELOPMENT TECHNOLOGIES

Back-end Technologies

Front-end technologies

IN CONCLUSION

How to Approach Custom Web App Development?

CUSTOM WEB APP DEVELOPMENT: TECH OPPORTUNITIES

UP-TO-DATE CLOUD APP ARCHITECTURE

Server-side HTML cloud app architecture

JS generation widgets(AJAX)

Single-page application

SERVER-SIDE TECHNOLOGIES FOR CUSTOM WEB APP DEVELOPMENT

PHP

ASP.NET

Node.js

Ruby on Rails

Java

JAVASCRIPT FRAMEWORKS FOR CUSTOM WEB APP DEVELOPMENT

React

Vue.js

Angular

CUSTOM WEB APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT CYCLE

WEB DEVELOPMENT TEAM COMPOSITION

IN CONCLUSION

Node.js Backend Development: Features, Benefits

What Is Node.js Used For?

Why Is Node.js Good For the Backend?

Other Cases Of Node.js Use

Node.js Frameworks

Advantages of Node.js Backend Development

Node.js Performance: How Using Node.js Can Enhance The Apps’ Performance?

The Popularity of Node.JS Among IT Companies

Who Uses Node.js?

In Conclusion