Hybrid vs Native Mobile Apps

Native Mobile Applications

In a nutshell, native apps provide the best usability, the best features, and the best overall mobile experience. There are some things you only get with native apps:

• Multi-touch – double taps, pinch-spread, and other compound UI gestures.
• Fast graphics API – the native platform gives you the fastest graphics, which may not be a big deal if you’re showing a static screen with only a few elements, or a very big deal if you’re using a lot of data and require a fast refresh.
• Fluid animation – related to the fast graphics API, is the ability to have fluid animation. This is especially important in gaming, highly interactive reporting, or intensely computational algorithms for transforming photos and sounds.
• Built-in components – The camera, address book, geolocation, and other features native to the device can be seamlessly integrated into mobile apps. Another important built-in component is encrypted storage, but more about that later.
• Ease of use – The native platform is what people are accustomed to, and so when you add that familiarity with all of the native features they expect, you have an app that’s just plain easier to use.
• Documentation – There are over 2500 books alone for iOS and Android development, with many more articles, blog posts, and detailed technical threads on sites like StackOverflow.

Native apps are usually developed using an integrated development environment (IDE). IDEs provide tools for building, debugging, project management, version control, and other tools that professional developers need. While iOS and Android apps are developed using different IDEs and languages, there’s a lot of parity in the development environments, and there’s not much reason to delve into the differences. Simply put, you use the tools required by the device.

You need these tools because native apps are more difficult to develop. Likewise, the level of experience required is higher than in other development scenarios; you don’t just cut and paste Objective-C and expect it to work. Indeed, the technological know-how of your development team is an important consideration. If you’re a professional developer, you don’t have to be sold on proven APIs and frameworks, painless special effects through established components, or the benefits of having your code all in one place. Let’s face it, today, a skilled native iOS or Android developer is a rock star and can make rock star demands.

While we’ve touched on native apps from a development perspective, there’s also the more important perspective: the end user. When you’re looking for an app, you’ll find it in the store. When you start the app, it fires up immediately. When you use the app, you get fast performance and a consistent platform look and feel. When your app needs an update, it tells you so. Native apps give you everything you’d expect from the company that built your device, as if it were simply meant to be.

HTML5 Mobile Applications

If you’re new to mobile app development, you’re late to the party. However, for mobile Web-based apps, we’re still partying like it’s 1999! Sure, browsers have gotten better in the past umpteen years, but the underlying technology isn’t that much different than when you feared the Y2K bug.

But that can be a good thing. An HTML5 mobile app is basically a web page, or a series of web pages, that is designed to work on a tiny screen. As such, HTML5 apps are device agnostic and can be opened with any modern mobile browser. And because your content is on the web, it’s searchable, which can be a huge benefit depending on the app (shopping, for example).

If you have experience developing Web apps, you’ll take to HTML5 like a duck to water. If you’re new to Web development, the technological bar is lower; it’s easier to get started here than in native or hybrid development. Unfortunately, every mobile device seems to have its own idea of what constitutes usable screen size and resolution, and so there’s an additional burden of testing on different devices. Browser incompatibility is especially rife on Android devices, so browser beware.

An important part of the “write-once-run-anywhere” HTML5 methodology is that distribution and support are much easier than for native apps. Need to make a bug fix or add features? Done and deployed for all users. For a native app, there are longer development and testing cycles, after which the consumer typically must log into a store and download a new version to get the latest fix.

In the last year, HTML5 has emerged as a very popular way for building mobile applications. Multiple UI frameworks are available for solving some of the most complex problems that no developer wants to reinvent. iScroll does a phenomenal job of emulating momentum-style scrolling. JQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch provide elegant mobile components, with hundreds, if not thousands, of plugins that offer everything from carousels to super elaborate controls.

So if HTML5 apps are easier to develop, easier to support, and can reach the widest range of devices, where do these apps lose out? We already reviewed the major benefits of native development, so we’ll just reiterate that you can’t access native features on the device. Users won’t have the familiarity of the native look and feel, or be able to use compound gestures they are familiar with. But strides are being made on all fronts, and more and more functionality is supported by browsers all the time.

The latest batch of browsers support hardware-accelerated CSS3 animation properties, providing smooth motion for sliding panels as well as transitions between screens, but even that can’t match the power and flexibility of native apps. Today, it’s simply not possible to capture multi-touch input events (determining when more than one finger is on the screen) or create path-style elegance with spinout buttons and photos that hover, then drop into the right place.

However, significant limitations, especially for enterprise mobile, are offline storage and security. While you can implement a semblance of offline capability by caching files on the device, it just isn’t a very good solution. Although the underlying database might be encrypted, it’s not as well segmented as a native keychain encryption that protects each app with a developer certificate. Also, if a web app with authentication is launched from the desktop, it will require users to enter their credentials every time the app is sent to the background. This is a lousy experience for the user. In general, implementing even trivial security measures on a native platform can be a complex task for a mobile Web developer. Therefore, if security is of the utmost importance, it can be the deciding factor on which mobile technology you choose.

Hybrid Mobile Applications

Hybrid development combines the best (or worst) of both the native and HTML5 worlds. We define a hybrid as a web app, primarily built using HTML5 and JavaScript, that is then wrapped inside a thin native container that provides access to native platform features. PhoneGap is an example of the most popular container for creating hybrid mobile apps.

For the most part, hybrid apps provide the best of both worlds. Existing web developers who have become gurus at optimizing JavaScript, pushing CSS to create beautiful layouts, and writing compliant HTML code that works on any platform can now create sophisticated mobile applications that don’t sacrifice the cool native capabilities. In certain circumstances, native developers can write plugins for tasks like image processing, but in cases like this, the devil is in the details.

On iOS, the embedded web browser, or the UI WebView, is not identical to the Safari browser. While the differences are minor, they can cause debugging headaches. That’s why it pays off to invest in popular frameworks that have addressed all of the limitations.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing, also on-demand computing, is a kind of Internet-based computing that provides shared processing resources and data to computers and other devices on demand. It is a model for enabling ubiquitous, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services), which can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort. Cloud computing and storage solutions provide users and enterprises with various capabilities to store and process their data in third-party data centers. It relies on the sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale, similar to a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network.

Advocates claim that cloud computing allows companies to avoid upfront infrastructure costs and focus on projects that differentiate their businesses instead of on infrastructure. Proponents also claim that cloud computing allows enterprises to get their applications up and running faster, with improved manageability and less maintenance, and enables IT to more rapidly adjust resources to meet fluctuating and unpredictable business demand. Cloud providers typically use a “pay as you go” model. This can lead to unexpectedly high charges if administrators do not adapt to the cloud pricing model.

The present availability of high-capacity networks, low-cost computers and storage devices as well as the widespread adoption of hardware virtualization, service-oriented architecture, and autonomic and utility computing, has led to a growth in cloud computing. Companies can scale up as computing needs increase and then scale down again as demands decrease.

Cloud computing has become a highly demanded service or utility due to the advantages of high computing power, low cost of services, high performance, scalability, accessibility, as well as availability. Some cloud vendors are experiencing growth rates of 50% per year, but being still in a stage of infancy, they have pitfalls that need to be addressed to make cloud computing services more reliable and user-friendly.

Cloud Characteristics

• Agility improves with users’ ability to re-provision technological infrastructure resources.
• Cost reductions claimed by cloud providers. A public-cloud delivery model converts capital expenditure to operational expenditure. This purportedly lowers barriers to entry, as infrastructure is typically provided by a third party and need not be purchased for one-time or infrequent intensive computing tasks. Pricing on a utility computing basis is fine-grained, with usage-based options, and fewer IT skills are required for implementation (in-house). The e-FISCAL project’s state-of-the-art repository contains several articles looking into cost aspects in more detail; most of them conclude that cost savings depend on the type of activities supported and the type of infrastructure available in-house.
• Device and location independence enable users to access systems using a web browser regardless of their location or what device they use (e.g., PC, mobile phone). As infrastructure is off-site (typically provided by a third-party) and accessed via the Internet, users can connect from anywhere.
• Maintenance of cloud computing applications is easier because they do not need to be installed on each user’s computer and can be accessed from different places.
• Multitenancy enables the sharing of resources and costs across a large pool of users, thus allowing for:
• * centralization of infrastructure in locations with lower costs (such as real estate, electricity, etc.)
• * peak-load capacity increases (users need not engineer for the highest possible load levels)
• * utilisation and efficiency improvements for systems that are often only 10–20% utilised.
• Performance is monitored, and consistent and loosely coupled architectures are constructed using web services as the system interface.
• Productivity may be increased when multiple users can work on the same data simultaneously, rather than waiting for it to be saved and emailed. Time may be saved as information does not need to be re-entered when fields are matched, nor do users need to install application software upgrades to their computers.
• Reliability improves with the use of multiple redundant sites, which makes well-designed cloud computing suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery.
• Scalability and elasticity via dynamic (“on-demand”) provisioning of resources on a fine-grained, self-service basis in near real-time (Note: the VM startup time varies by VM type, location, OS, and cloud providers), without users having to engineer for peak loads. This gives the ability to scale up when the usage needs increase or down if resources are not being used.
• Security can improve due to centralization of data, increased security-focused resources, etc., but concerns can persist about loss of control over certain sensitive data, and the lack of security for stored kernels. Security is often as good as or better than other traditional systems, in part because providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford to tackle. However, the complexity of security is greatly increased when data is distributed over a wider area or over a greater number of devices, as well as in multi-tenant systems shared by unrelated users. In addition, user access to security audit logs may be difficult or impossible. Private cloud installations are in part motivated by users’ desire to retain control over the infrastructure and avoid losing control of information security.

Service models

Though service-oriented architecture advocates “everything as a service” (with the acronyms EaaS or XaaS or simply aas), cloud-computing providers offer their “services” according to different models, which happen to form a stack: infrastructure, platform, and software-as-a-service.

• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
• Platform as a service (PaaS)
• Software as a service (SaaS)

Deployment models

• Private cloud – is cloud infrastructure operated solely for a single organization, whether managed internally or by a third-party, and hosted either internally or externally. Undertaking a private cloud project requires a significant level and degree of engagement to virtualize the business environment, and requires the organization to reevaluate decisions about existing resources. When done right, it can improve business, but every step in the project raises security issues that must be addressed to prevent serious vulnerabilities. Self-run data centers are generally capital-intensive. They have a significant physical footprint, requiring allocations of space, hardware, and environmental controls. These assets have to be refreshed periodically, resulting in additional capital expenditures. They have attracted criticism because users “still have to buy, build, and manage them” and thus do not benefit from less hands-on management, essentially ” the economic model that makes cloud computing such an intriguing concept”.
• Public cloud – A cloud is called a “public cloud” when the services are rendered over a network that is open for public use. Public cloud services may be free. Technically, there may be little or no difference between public and private cloud architecture; however, security considerations may be substantially different for services (applications, storage, and other resources) that are made available by a service provider for a public audience and when communication is effected over a non-trusted network. Generally, public cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google own and operate the infrastructure at their data center, and access is generally via the Internet. AWS and Microsoft also offer direct connect services called “AWS Direct Connect” and “Azure ExpressRoute” respectively, such connections require customers to purchase or lease a private connection to a peering point offered by the cloud provider.
• Hybrid cloud – Hybrid cloud is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community, or public) that remain distinct entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models. Hybrid cloud can also mean the ability to connect colocation, managed and/or dedicated services with cloud resources.

Cloud Computing Providers

Some of the best and most well-known cloud computing providers are:

• Windows Azure
• Amazon Web Services
• Google Cloud Platform
• Hewlett-Packard Enterprise
• IBM
• Digital Ocean
• CITRIX
• Sales Force
• OpenStack
• VPS.NET

You could find a detailed comparison table of providers here. Also, there is an interesting article in Forbes Magazine here.

Symfony2 meets Drupal 8

Drupal 8 has replaced several fundamental pieces with fresh components from Symfony2. Drupal 8 is the new standard for creating incredible digital experiences—for small businesses, global enterprises, and everything in between. Symfony 2 is a powerful framework used to build web-based applications. It cannot be used to administer a website, as it’s not a CMS. What it can do is work along with the CMS and empower it.

In reality, most CMS can be used over Symfony with a few exceptions, like Drupal. To overcome these hurdles, Drupal 8 is designed to accommodate certain Symfony 2 layers. This particular combination is a match made in open source heaven, forming a well-balanced system for a flexible CMS. Similarly, going hand-in-hand with Symfony has made PHP a mandatory language for Drupal developers.

How Symfony And Drupal 8 Work Together

We have already established the fact that Drupal 8 is not adopting all Symfony components. They’re only making use of the smarter layers to extend Drupal 8’s functionality. Looking at the schematics, you can get a rough idea of what components of Drupal 8 and Symfony 2 are put into use.

Drupal bypasses the “bundle” approach that is more popular for web applications. As for any CMS, the framework needs to be completely flexible and extendable. Thus, the layers were carefully selected. Drupal 8 exclusive layers have the 3rd party libraries and the core functionalities like the themes, modules, the core library, etc.

You can read the entire article here.

Also, you could find some interesting articles here and here.

Symfony and Angular Full Stack Tutorial

In this developer tutorial, learn how to build a full-stack App using Symfony and Angular. Symfony is one of the most used PHP frameworks nowadays; it is robust, has a lot of support, is easy to maintain, and has many libraries to help us during the development process. And with its MVC architecture, it is compatible with the most commonly used database engines.

Creating a RESTful API with Symfony can be really easy. For this example, we are going to use version 3.3 (one of the most frequently used) in a very basic mode. To display and manage the data on the client side, we will use Angular 4; the DB engine we’ll use is MySQL.

Read more….

React starter repo with Symfony 4

React starter repo with Symfony 4 and Webpack Encore

Docker Enterprise Container Platform

Docker is a tool designed to make it easier to create, deploy, and run applications by using containers. Containers allow a developer to package up an application with all of the parts it needs, such as libraries and other dependencies, and ship it all out as one package. By doing so, thanks to the container, the developer can rest assured that the application will run on any other Linux machine, regardless of any customised settings that machine might have that could differ from the machine used for writing and testing the code.

Here you can get installation instructions, and at this link you can see a useful Docker commands guide.

Django Framework with React

Django is one of the most complete web development frameworks available. With the power of Python, we can get an application up and running in just about no time. It manages everything from the database to the final HTML sent to the client.

However, with the advent of Single-page applications (SPAs), it’s become increasingly common to create applications that use Django only to provide an API that responds to JSON data consumed by applications developed in the most varied JavaScript frameworks. It’s actually a trend that the majority of languages are following.

This architecture (that separates the front from the back-end) allows a better decoupling of them both, with teams that can develop in their domains completely independently. It also enables multiple client apps to interact with the same API, while ensuring data integrity and business rules and a variety of user interfaces.

On the other hand, two different projects generate even more work: two separate deployments, two different environments to configure, etc. One way to simplify this is to use Django’s own capabilities to serve static files. After all, the front-end application is nothing more than a set of files of this type.

In this article, we’ll outline how to create a simple CRUD API with Django and its famous Django REST Framework, free from CORS common issues, and integrate it with a React app. We’ll cover everything from setup and configuration to the customization of our front-end components and back-end API. You can expose your API in different ways with Django. While GraphQL is a safe bet, we’re going to use traditional REST endpoints.

Read more of this tutorial on logrocket blog site.

Larissa COVID-19 treatment algorithm

Lessons from pathophysiology: Use of individualized combination treatments with immune interventional agents to tackle severe respiratory failure in patients with COVID-19. Click here to read this paper. Congrats to the authors!