Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are web applications that provide a user experience like that of native apps. They are designed to work on any device or platform and can be installed directly from a web browser without the need for an app store. PWAs are built using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and have several advantages over traditional web apps, such as offline support, push notifications, and the ability to be added to the user’s home screen.

Why React.js is a good choice for PWAs

React.js is a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It has gained popularity among developers for its performance, simplicity, and reusability. React.js is also a good choice for building PWAs, as it allows developers to create dynamic and responsive user interfaces, while also providing the necessary tools for building offline-first applications.

This blog post will examine PWA development using React.js. The advantages of using React.js for PWAs, best practices for constructing PWAs with React.js, and actual PWAs created with React.js will all be covered.

Benefits of React.js for PWAs

A. High performance

React.js is known for its performance optimisation. By using a virtual DOM (document object model), React.js minimizes the amount of time and resources required to update the user interface. This results in faster load times and smoother user interactions, making it an ideal choice for PWAs.

B. Reusability

React.js allows developers to create reusable components that can be used across multiple projects. This can save time and reduce the amount of code required to build a PWA, making development more efficient.

C. Components based Architecture

React.js is built around a component-based architecture, which makes it easy to manage complex UI components. This also makes it easier to update and maintain the codebase, reducing the likelihood of errors or bugs.

Complex UI components may be managed with ease thanks to React.js’s component-based architecture. Additionally, it is simpler to update and maintain the codebase as a result, which lowers the possibility of problems or errors.

D. Seamless integration with other tools and libraries

React.js can be easily integrated with other tools and libraries, such as Redux or GraphQL. This allows developers to build more complex PWAs with ease while also maintaining a clean and maintainable codebase.

E. Improved developer experience

React.js provides developers with a simplified syntax and intuitive API, which makes development faster and more enjoyable. Additionally, React.js has a large and active community, which means that developers have access to a wealth of resources, documentation, and support.

Best practices for building PWAs with React.js

A. Configuring webpack for PWA-specific requirements

Webpack is a popular module bundler used in React.js development. To build PWAs with React.js, webpack can be configured to meet PWA-specific requirements, such as code splitting, caching, and offline support.

B. Code splitting and lazy loading

Code splitting and lazy loading can improve the performance of a PWA by reducing the amount of code that needs to be loaded upfront. This can be achieved in React.js by using tools such as React.lazy and Suspense.

(Code splitting example)

C. Optimizing images and other assets

Optimizing images and other assets can improve the performance of a PWA by reducing the amount of data that needs to be downloaded. React.js provides several ways to optimize images and other assets, such as using the Webpack image loader or the React.lazy and Suspense APIs.

D. Implementing service workers and offline support

A crucial component of PWAs that enables them to operate offline or with subpar network connections are service workers. Service workers can be implemented in React.js using a variety of methods, including the Workbox library and the create-react-app utility.

(Index.js file example)

(Service worker js file example)

Push notifications and background sync are two examples of PWA-specific functionality that can be implemented using React.js’s lifecycle methods. These techniques enable developers to build PWAs with seamless and interesting user interfaces.

However, by using browser APIs such as navigator.serviceWorker and window.Notification, we can implement PWA-specific features. By leveraging these APIs, developers can build PWAs that provide a native-like experience to users while also being fast, reliable, and accessible. 

Also read:  Enable Increased Revenue using Rapid Application Development

Real-world examples of PWAs built with React.js

A. Facebook’s mobile website

Facebook’s mobile website is a PWA built with React.js. It provides a native app-like experience with features such as push notifications and offline support.

B. Twitter Lite

Twitter Lite is another PWA built with React.js. It offers a fast and lightweight experience, with features such as caching and background sync.

C. Lyft PWA

Lyft’s PWA is built with React.js and offers a fast and responsive user experience, with features such as offline support and push notifications.

D. Pinterest PWA

Pinterest’s PWA is built with React.js and offers a seamless user experience with features such as caching and push notifications.

Conclusion

With React.js, building Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) becomes a breeze. Its high performance ensures that your apps run smoothly, providing a seamless user experience. The component-based architecture of React.js allows for reusability and modularity, enabling you to create complex PWAs with ease. Additionally, React.js integrates effortlessly with other tools and libraries, offering flexibility and expandability for your projects. Not only does React.js empower your PWAs with its technical advantages, but it also enhances the developer experience by providing a rich ecosystem and a supportive community. Start harnessing the power of React.js to unlock the full potential of your PWAs and deliver outstanding user experiences.

The post Power up Your Progressive Web Apps with React.js appeared first on Indium.

Gartner defines the product development lifecycle as the end-to-end process of designing, developing, testing, and launching a new product or service. For the effective transformation and maintenance of any idea in a product development lifecycle, it’s critical to follow a systematic approach to prioritizing investments in product and customer experience. You also need to integrate insights and best practices to maximize product management efforts, to improve the effectiveness of the product and engineering relationship.

A well-thought-through product lifecycle management can lead to.

• Informed decision-making at every stage of the development process
• Increased ROI
• Improved profitability
• Development of an effective marketing strategy
• Building a roadmap to make the product appealing and improve customer loyalty

The End-to-End Product Development Lifecycle

As we saw earlier, while the entire product development lifecycle can be divided into a few logical steps, in reality, several considerations at each stage can make or break the process. Therefore, getting them right every time is critical. This is where product engineering can play a key role.

Product engineering is an essential component of the product development lifecycle. It involves creating the product’s technical specifications, which serve as the foundation for the product’s design, development, and testing phases. Without proper product engineering, a product may not meet the requirements of the market or fail to meet the business’s goals.

Let’s look at the steps involved in product engineering.

Step 1. Ideation and Roadmap: Idea generation may or may not be the first step. What we mean is, there may be no great ideas for a product and its features or too many ideas that make focusing and planning the whole process a challenge. In either case, it is best to.

• go back to the customer problem the product aims to solve
• list out features based on recommendations
• assess them based on the value they create
• evaluate the time needed to develop those features
• understand the complexity involved, and
• shortlist features that are a must-have and can be developed quickly.

One of the advantages of agile development is that the first release does not have to contain all the features. It can be upgraded progressively and fine-tuned with feedback from the market. Therefore, we suggest that the ideas be parked for now, and developing a vision and a roadmap take precedence. Ideas can be part of the roadmap, to be released in later versions.

Step 2. Design and Specifications: Once there is clarity on the product concept, the next step is to flesh it out and add details. You need to understand the effort each feature will require and how it will interact with the rest of the product. You can use product design tools to generate 2D/3D models that can simulate, validate and analyze the product, and get user feedback. This stage ensures that the final product will conform to the desired specifications and requirements.

Step 3. Product Launch and Market Development: Once the design has been finalized and revised based on feedback, the developers can get into action, with a product manager monitoring the entire process to ensure quality, conformance, and timely delivery. Parallelly, you can also create marketing strategies and put them into practice to create a ripple in the market.

You need to arrive at the right pricing. It should neither be formidably high nor make the product look cheap. To be profitable, it must cover the cost of resources, effort, and marketing expenses.

Testing can also happen parallelly in the DevOps approach. Live users may also be used to test the product closer to release. The internal and external stakeholders can come together to ensure the product performs as promised, delivers value, solves the pain point for which it was created, and is compliant with applicable regulatory requirements.

Step 4. Review and Improvements: Based on the reaction of the users and the roadmap decided on earlier, new features can get added to the product. With each addition, it needs to be tested to ensure that the new features integrate seamlessly with the existing ones.

Feedback, analytics, and user data can help the development team make informed decisions on what needs strengthening, which features need improvement, and what is not working at all.

Indium Software worked with a US-based FinTech firm that specializes in cutting-edge payday lending solutions. It serves 0.5 million consumers, handling 7 million transactions plus. But the loan workflow processes were ineffective, slow, and costly. There were a lot of manual processes that made the system inefficient and resource intensive. Indium developed a responsive user interface after analyzing the current process, interacting with the users to understand their roles and requirements, assessing consumer behavior, and evaluating the regulatory requirements to improve workflow efficiency.  

A scalable and adaptable architecture was put in place automating nearly 70% of the receipt process. This resulted in improving the robustness of the origination process and responsiveness to loan applicants.

Post-Product Release Best Practices

Time-to-market plays a critical role in deciding the success of the product, along with the presence of innovative features and value additions. Another factor to keep in mind is that over time, other similar and better products may enter the market, making your product irrelevant. So, you must constantly evaluate the product and compare it with its peers, or even other products that may not be directly competing with it. This will help assess what kind of features need to be added and help understand how your product can remain relevant to its customers.

At times, it may also require the product development team to start afresh and bring a completely new product into the market. For instance, when cloud computing and cloud migration became widely prevalent, it compelled businesses to reconsider their product development strategy and focus on developing more cloud-native solutions.

Product engineering goes beyond product design and development. Compliance, governance, and security are also important aspects. The right technology stack and architecture can have a tremendous impact on product performance along with making the pricing competitive.

Indium Software has a team of cross-domain experts working closely with the technology team to design, develop, and test products. We work with businesses of all sizes, developing cost-effective, innovative, and high-performance products.

FAQs

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DevQAOps 

DevQAOps encompasses a wide range of practices and technologies that are used to improve the quality and reliability of software systems. It integrates IAAS + PAAS + SAAS as a process/discipline of managing and scaling the DevQAOps Cycle to maximize efficiency, delivery speed, and product quality.

Who needs Separate QAOps

• The larger Enterprise architecture involved multiple tools and technologies: Microblogging, E-commerce, Telecommunication, Infrastructure, Banking, and Healthcare. This larger enterprise has multiple teams like Frontend, Backend, multiple Service Layers (Microservices), Web Servers, Kafka, Caches, Multiple databases (RDMS & NoSQL), Monitoring tools, deployments version control, and Media Server (if applicable) It varies depends upon the domain and enterprise requirement. For a faster release cycle and systematic approaches, TestOps will help with deployment and environmental support.
• A product team wants their product to test with a variety of machines (i.e. ARM), a variety of Operating Systems with various versions, and its dependency libraries testing, more than functional environment-related testing plays a major role in such a team required Testops.
• Multiple product companies always share the Devops with every other team, so if you want your developers focused on development activities instead of sharing the responsibilities. You can enable TestOps Person/teams for their all-test product environments, which will help for faster collaboration and focused process.
• High-impact applications require multiple QA environments i.e. QA, Staging, QA-Automation, UAT, and Pre-Production.

• TestOps consists of the following components:

Planning

• TestOps is like DevOps planning, which involves.
• Identify the Goals, and requirements for the testing process.
• Determine the scope of the testing and types of testing required.
• Identifying the potential risk constraints.
• Timeline, Estimation, and milestone for the testing process.
• Testing schedule, resource allocation, and testing deliverables should be part of the test plan.
• Shift-Left, Shift-Right, and In-Sprint Automation Approaches are defined in the planning phase.

Additionally, the planning phase for TestOps should include identifying the tools and technologies that will be used to support the testing process and ensuring that the necessary infrastructure is in place to support the testing.

Shift Left Approach

The goal of shift left testing is to identify the bugs and resolve them as early as possible, testing will be started along with the design phase or during development. This approach reduces the costly bug.

Shift Right Approach

The testing is in the immediate pre-release and post-release phases (production). Customer Experience, correct behavior, performance, and availability are the key goals of shift-right testing.

In-Sprint Automation Approach

It’s the approach to automate the requirement/user stories within the same sprint it has been developed. without leaving any automation backlogs, which required good collaboration and potential automation testers.

Tools: Jira, Azure DevOps Board

Continuous Integration: CI

Continuous Integration is one of the key processes in TestOps which helps to automatically build, test, deploy, and deliver the software. CI can be applied for both development and automation code. Automating this testing process helps to detect and resolve the issues.

By Integrating the Test Automation/Performance into the CI Pipeline, teams can run automated tests each time code is committed, which helps to capture the issues in the early phase of development. The same process is applicable for the automation team to commit the code and run the verify pipelines.

• Quality Gates
• Static code analysis checks the code smell and security vulnerability.

Many tools are available in the market, SonarQube and ESlint are popular.

Tools: Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab CI/CD, Azure CI/CD

Continuous Testing: (CT)

Continuous testing in Testops Another important process in Testops involves continuously running automated tests throughout the development process to ensure that changes don’t create new bugs or regressions.

Automate Everything in various layers as part of DevQAOps

Infrastructure automation: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a method for managing infrastructure resources through code, rather than manual configuration. IaC tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or ARM templates enable infrastructure definition in code, versioning, testing, and deployment.

Tools: Terraform

Platform automation: Platform Automation or PaaS (Platform as a Service) Automation is the process of automating the deployment, and maintenance of applications and infrastructure on a cloud-based platform. This includes tasks such as provisioning resources, configuring networks, deploying software, and monitoring the performance of applications. The goal of PaaS automation is to simplify the process of delivering and managing applications, increase efficiency, reduce manual errors, and provide a more stable and scalable platform. It always intersects with the continuous deployment segment.

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk – Automates the deployment and management of applications on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.
• Google App Engine – A cloud-based platform for building and hosting web applications.
• Microsoft Azure – A cloud computing platform that automates the deployment and management of applications.
• OpenShift – An open-source PaaS that automates the deployment, management, and scaling of applications.

example: PaaS automation with Terraform focuses on automating the deployment and management of platform-level components, such as databases, middleware, and other managed services.

Tools: Terraform, Ansible, Azure, Aws

Test automation: The goal of test automation is to increase the efficiency and accuracy of testing, reduce the time and cost of manual testing, and improve the quality of the software.

Automate Everything: If something can develop the same thing can be automated and tested.

The testing approach (API, UI, or Mobile) will depend on the nature of the application and the requirements of the testing process. For example:

API testing is appropriate for verifying the functionality and performance of the application’s APIs. UI testing is appropriate for verifying the functionality and visual appearance of the application’s user interface. Mobile testing is appropriate for verifying the functionality, compatibility, and performance of mobile applications on different devices and platforms.

Tools & Library: Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, Eggplant, UFT, Ranorex, TestNg, NUnit, Cucumber…

Continuous Deployment: CD

Continuous Deployment is an integral part of environmental management, continuous monitoring, and platform automation. It will often intersect with these areas. Continuous deployment supports faster release cycles by automating and streamlining the deployment process, enabling teams to get new code changes into production more quickly and with less friction.

There are many deployment strategies for larger teams.

1. Feature Flags

2. Blue/Green Deployments.

3. Rolling update deployments.

Environment Management:

One of the key components of TestOps is setting up the environment. Test for interoperability and compatibility mainly depends on the environment. Set up the necessary infrastructure and configuration to meet the requirements. This can be achieved through IAC (Infrastructure as Code), Containers, and Container Orchestration. Help in deploying infrastructure, networks, virtual machines, load balancers, firewalls, policies, and all other connections. All of these IACs can be achieved through the following tools/vendors:

1. Terraform: The IAC engine helps to automate a variety of IAC tasks, supporting multiple cloud providers.

2. ARM (Azure Resource Manager): Only support Azure IAC

3. AWS Cloud Training: Only support AWS IAC

4. Google Cloud Deployment Manager: Only support Google IAC.

Containers and container orchestration play a key role in setting up and deploying environments. This means that developers/testers can test their apps on different operating systems, runtimes, and other software dependencies without worrying about conflicts or inconsistencies. Consistency.

Here are some specific ways to use Docker/Kubernetes for interoperability testing:

• Create a repeatable test environment:
• Tested on multiple platforms:
• Test in different runtime environments:
• Simulation of different environments:

Overall, Docker makes it easy to create consistent and repeatable testing environments and test apps across operating systems, runtime, and other dependencies, which can help ensure an application can interact with many types of systems. Docker is mainly focused on packaging and distributing applications, and Kubernetes focuses on organizing and managing those applications after they are deployed. However, Docker and Kubernetes are often used together.

Tools: Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Terraform, Powershell, shell scripting, Yaml

Continuous Monitoring: CM

The continuous monitoring process monitors various metrics such as performance, security, and functionality, as well as continuous testing and updating of the application to ensure that it meets the required standards.

Choosing the correct tools for monitoring, such as performance monitoring tools, log analysis tools, or network monitoring tools. There are many tools in the market.

Performance Monitoring tool: Cloud-based monitoring tools monitor the performance of applications, servers, and infrastructure, and install the agents in servers to collect the data of the applications and servers.

Log Monitoring & Analysis tool: It will help to collect, analyze and visualize the data generated by the servers, applications and infrastructure.

Network Monitoring tool: monitor the performance of their networks and identify any issues that may affect network performance, configure it to collect data from your network devices, such as routers and switches.

Tools: DataDog, Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), Splunk, Nagios, AppDynamics, SolarWinds

To summarize, QAOps is the process every organization needs with a strong hold on the operations with DevQAOps, with a focus shift of QA being part of Operations.

The post Why QAOps has become an Inevitable process in Software Delivery appeared first on Indium.