Business Advantages of Traditional Software Development

All businesses and IT firms will usually need some form of software during their lifecycle. The types of software utilized by most companies vary from applications that will facilitate better management of key organizational functions - Human Resources Department, Finance and Accounts, Inventory and Stocks to be more precise elements of software that have a key purpose such as Content Management Software for use on company websites. Even though these software applications can be bought "off the shelf", there are many business advantages that can be related with choosing custom software development.

Custom Software Development Is Created Uniquely For You
Developing custom software is a tailored made to determine process, which means that any applications and software programs developed as a result of the process will be uniquely made for your company and its specific needs and requirements. Fundamentally a piece of custom made software is flexible and has the potential to fulfill your specifications meaning that it is easy to use and can be deployed throughout your entire organization. Instead of having to make do with a readymade software program or application, with customized software you can be sure that what you will obtain will be entirely fit for purpose. There are also considerable financial benefits that can be associated with custom made software even though it costing a slight more to purchase than readymade packages. Software applications that have been made for you don't require any license fees, so you can distribute them across your entire organization without requiring paying extra.

Custom Software Developers Will Support Your Company
When creating customer software designed for your company developers will design and develop code it to integrate properly within your firm. The software won't just help you achieve what you need it to achieve, it will be affluent in features and tools that will make it usable by the team who will be working with it. With a piece of custom software almost all the requirements of your business will be well thought-out, and developers will meet these both in the way that they develop the software and the after care that they provide properly. While some training and support is available with readymade software to a certain level, with custom made software your developers will continue to work with and support your company whether that's through training staff members in the use of the software or providing maintenance and technical help to remedy any errors that might crop up in the software.

Customized Software Is Secure And Protected
The readymade software packages available to businesses today are certainly a lot more secure than the ones that have been developed in previous years, nevertheless they don't compare to the security levels of customized software the reason it has been created for your company it will only be usable by personnel in your firm. When you obtain custom software you will be given administrator rights to the software ensuring that you can change and alter user profiles and passwords to be in accord with your own internal data protection policies. Customized software used on the web is also a lot harder to hack than standard readymade software, and you can be sure that a reputable custom software developer will work hard to keep your application or program safe and secure.

Customized Software Is Quite Flexible
Customized software is designed to be adaptable and supple meeting your company's needs and requirements both now and in the future. Even if you need a few special software programs to accomplish organizational tasks, a custom developer will be able to integrate the different processes that you need into a sole usable application. Custom software is also much more probable to be cross-platform suitable, so you can be certain that when your company goes mobile you already have the necessary software that will support it.

Basics of Cross Platform Mobile Application Development

The use of Mobile Apps has been immensely increasing in the recent past. There is a lot of possibility for extension in this field. Nearly all principal software companies are focusing on mobile app development. Conversely, time and money are proving to be a challenge.

Frankly speaking an app built for an Android device will not be attuned with other devices, and the efforts are to be continual so as to make that app compatible with other devices. This impelled to the requirement for cross platform mobile apps. These apps bound the efforts of the developer for creating or testing mobile apps on various platforms. The theme of these tools is very easy, the developer can construct apps using any custom language (java or vb.net or HTML be it any scripting language). One time the design and execution of the app is accomplished, the developers can use an effortless function to generate the same functional app for any mobile platform version of Android, Blackberry, or iOS or any other mobile platform.

Reusability of code, Cost effective development and easy deployment are some of the benefits of using cross-platform networks. There are diverse cross-platform frameworks available. 

Some of the top ones are PhoneGap, Appcelerator Titanium and Rhodes.

 

1) PhoneGap: PhoneGap is an open source mobile application framework for building such cross-platform mobile applications utilizing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The app helps the developer create applications that can run on multiple devices/platforms with the same code base. Apps developed with PhoneGap can interrelate directly with mobile device hardware like GPS, which are unavailable to normal web apps. These apps can be built and deployed like native applications. PhoneGap supports nearly all platforms such as Android, iOS, Blackberry and Windows Mobile making it the most dominant framework for cross-platform development.

2) Appcelerator Titanium: Appcelerator is known for their innovative product, Titanium, which allows web developers to create mobile applications without knowledge of Cocoa-Touch or Java. Titanium is essentially an API and run-time which allows you to build a web application and deploy it to a mobile device, or run it on the desktop. A Titanium Mobile Web app is intended to be run from a web server. You can effectively run it from a browser as a local file also. The main downside with Appcelerator is that it doesn't have Android Emulator, a virtual mobile device that executes on your computer, which lets the programmers to develop and test Android applications without utilizing a physical device.

3) Rhodes: Rhodes is a Mobile App Development framework from "Rhomobile" that empowers developers to enhance sophisticated mobile apps that could be deployed on all the major mobile platforms like iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android.

Rhodes uses HTML for user interface development. Therefore, instead of having to develop the UI in Objective C, C++, Java, or.NET for each device, one can do it once in HTML and deploy on all the devices. Rhodes is dual-licensed under the GPL and a commercial license. Open-source Developers make their apps by using the GPL version of the framework without any cost. 

To summarize the cross platform mobile development tools are still not considered be solution. Although the majority of these tools are still growing rapidly the mobile platforms are evolving even swifter pace. Major platform vendors are contending against each other to bring loads of functionalities and capabilities to life. You may expect some surprises when testing the same functionality on different platforms/devices. Another significant thing to consider when constructing a new functionality that does not exist in the cross platform may take even more time to its cross platform counterpart. When the application is getting complex and time to bring in new enhancements, you cannot assume it would be breeze anymore.

Even though it is better to build proof of concepts and prototypes using these cross mobile frameworks, we should better estimate the nature of the app, users of the app, performance requirements and ease of maintenance and adapting enhancements.

Why Re-Engineering And Software Testing Are Critical For A Firm?

Testing of software is imperative as a few errors and faults are inevitable. Software developed will be put to testing procedures to look for as many faults as possible to make sure that a standardized product with least number of errors is delivered. The software testing team has majorly a couple of primary responsibilities

1. To recognize the defects and ensure that the software is error free

1. To confirm the software would be able to successfully meet the user's requirements

To sum it up it is the key goals of the testing team are to recognize errors, non-coherent and threats related with the product and communicate the same to the development team so that all the defects discovered are taken care of and a high class product can be delivered to the client.

Testing is not a single time activity. It needs to be carried out over the entire life cycle of the software. There are several reasons for which software would need to be tested again. Any changes big or small like version upgrade, enhancement or module addition, deployment at a new client site and addition in the number of users require the software to be re-tested to make sure that it is bug free.

Why re-engineering is required?

As quoted before as the software keeps on changing there is a need for altering the software applications and products as well as they need to be re-tuned to comply to the changing requirements. As the software firms constantly attempt to meet the customers' demand they also need to make certain that the software applications are often and continuously updated to keep pace with the challenging and competitive business world. In the elementary words re-engineering could be described as renovation. For e.g. If a program is written in an old programming language this would limit its functionalities. Now, if the same program is re-written in a language more relevant in today's time it would increase the functionality. 

Listed are some of the acumen why re-engineering is requisite in an organization

1. Pricing - Old software systems maintenance cost is high

1. Performance Issue - Improved performance of the re-engineered software acts as a huge incentive

1. Operation and flexibility - New and revised software system would be more agile and effortless to use

1. Data storage necessities - As the firm grows the data also grows. Increasing quantity of data create a need for the organization to revamp its existing systems and software

1. Altering technology trends - It is essential for a business to stay in tune with the changing technology trends and update its software accordingly.

Re-engineering or migration can be a modest challenging as the company's information and data can get vulnerable in the process.

The business needs to come up with a solid testing strategy to ensure conformance, completeness and agreement.

Effectual Methods To Develop JAVA Enterprise Applications

Java is a very well-liked and extensively used programming language for developing applications starting from mobile applications to enterprise servers and computers. The language was developed keeping the plan of giving a cross platform environment for software applications. At the moment, Java is present ubiquitously from mobile phones to web systems, from enterprise applications to desktop computers etc. Java applets are utilized in desktops to offer improved browsing experience to users.

If we discuss about J2EE or the Java to Enterprise Edition platform developed by Sun Microsystems which decides the standard for developing multi-tier enterprise applications. It is broadly used by top IT firms to design and develop applications. 

There are a range of elements that combine together to enable development, which are as follows:

·         Compilers are accountable for converting source code into Java by code

·          Loaders infers the Java class files into a readable format

·          JAR is an assembly of related class libraries.

·          Java.doc is  used as the documentation generator

·         JDB is used for documentation

The language has been intended to simplify the process of development of applications that make enterprise services available readily to customers. The J2EE application model evidently defines architecture for completing services such as multi-tier applications that distribute the scalability, accessibility and manageability necessary by enterprise-level applications. The application can be separated into following tiers: client tier, middle tier and data tier.

The Client Tier consists of an application like a Web browser, stand-alone application, or any other servers running on a different machine from the Java EE server, which then makes a request to it. With this architecture it receives the request, processes it and then sends back the response to the application.

The Middle Tier contains business functions that hold client requests and hence processes application data. It provides business logic and provides functionality to a particular business domain, like financial industry, e-commerce which contains the core functionality of process.

The Data Tier is also known as enterprise information systems which basically consist of an enterprise resource planning systems, legacy systems and database servers. These data resources are typically stored in a system separate from the Java EE server.

The main benefits of software development using java are:

• The Language supports multi-platform language and web-services too
• Java can be used to develop dynamic web applications such as e-commerce, e learning, polls, HTML forms processing and more
• J2EE combines Java technology-based applications or services to create highly customized applications or services
• Java supports to write powerful and efficient mobile application development content

J2EE permits developers to develop great, reliable, scalable and secured applications known as enterprise applications. These applications are consumed by huge corporations to overcome their IT challenges.

Why Choose PHP Over Other Web Development Languages?

Developers can opt from many scripting languages while developing web applications. Some of the programming languages that developers or programmers utilize in common are CGI, Perl, ASP and PHP. Conversely, PHP has definite benefits the reason for which it has become the most accepted web development language. IT firms ranging from medium sized to big are using PHP for creating multiple types of web applications. One can realize the competence of the language from the fact that huge applications like Facebook utilize PHP. Web developers having knowledge and experience in PHP are in soaring demand in the current times.

Developers are choosing PHP over the other languages due to the subsequent reasons.

Easy To Learn And Uncomplicated

The language is quite easier to understand than many other programming languages. This is because the language has resemblance with languages like Java and C. Even if you know only HTML, learning PHP would be quite easy for you. The language is perfect for beginners since it is easy to understand and clear.

Flexibility

PHP offers a higher level of flexibility as compared to languages like ASP. NET in addition the language is open source software you can use any text editor to write the code. Some of the common text editors which you can utilize are Notepad, TeXShop, WordPad so on and so forth. Alternatively, while using ASP. NET, you have to utilize Microsoft Visual Studio for creating the code. PHP is also not OS specific and quite portable as it runs well on operating systems like Windows, UNIX and Linux OS.

Dynamic

The language creates dynamic websites which refresh automatically. If you use PHP for developing a website, you do not need to make any alterations or updates manually for refreshing it.

Web Integration

The language has created more than thirty percent of the applications present in the internet. The PHP language processor integrates with various systems like Pusher. Nearly every business is using the language including large corporations, government, hospitals and banks.

Frameworks

You can find a great number of PHP frameworks. These frameworks help you to take out a mixture of tasks using PHP. You can perform tasks like code reuse, session management and finding database libraries easily using PHP frameworks. A popular PHP framework is Slim.

Support

In addition the support and documentation for PHP is quite easy. The support forums which aid the language are completely free. You can find many blogs and forums online to help you if you face any coding issues. You can also find support through social media among all scripting languages the user base of PHP is huge. This is one of the causes behind such a huge support community of the language.

Easy To Resolve Challenges

Web developers face programming challenges very often. In case of PHP, you can easily find the issues and fix them. In case of other languages it takes quite an effort to fix those problems.

Object Oriented Programming

The PHP language is competent of calling Windows and Java COM objects. You can also create custom classes which other classes can have access to from custom classes. This increases the effectiveness of the language.

These are the major benefits of PHP over other scripting languages. Above and beyond, the language is an open source and free. Applications developed using PHP are very rapid and have a high level of security. All these factors have made the language highly well-liked in the word of web development.