#SolutionsForSuccess

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Write Once, Run Everywhere - Are we there yet?

For a number of years the software development industry has struggled to find a solution to a rather old idea: write once, run everywhere. First, there was Java, which for a little while seemed to be the answer, however for numerous reasons it didn’t live up to the dream. For a while it looked like everyone gave up, and the chase was off, however Microsoft released the .NET Framework and the game was on, once again. Soon after, a group of developers sponsored by Novell started project Mono with the idea of porting the Microsoft .NET Framework to Linux (and implicitly other platforms such as OSX). This was the foundation of Xamarin’s products (Xamarin iOS, Xamarin for Android, Xamarin for Mac) was built on. Fast forward to May 2014 and Xamarin just released Xamarin.Forms, a new technology for building cross-platform native mobile application using C# and .NET Framework. With Xamarin.Forms a developer can create mobile native applications for iOS, Android and Windows Phone (please note that you have to hold the appropriate developer licenses in order to create applications for all three platforms).  Let’s take a closer look at how Xamarin.Forms delivers on the write once, run everywhere promise.

Before Xamarin.Forms, developers were writing application using shared business logic in the form of Portable Class Libraries (PCLs) and designing the user interface (UI) specific to each platform using either Xamarin.iOS (Xcode or Xamarin Studio’s built-in iOS designer) or Xamarin.Android tooling. Xamarin.Forms goes one step further enabling developers to share UI code.  Also, the developer uses Xamarin.Forms controls to create the UI and the resulting applications render the UI using elements native to each platform. Further, the developer can further customize the UI using platform-specific Renderers to create rich user experiences tailored to each platform.

As far as writing the shared UI code, the developer has two choices: create the user interface programmatically in code; or using XAML which found its greatest utility in defining user interfaces within the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Silverlight and Windows Runtime. Each approach has pros and cons and ultimately it comes down to what you’re comfortable with. It’s worth mentioning though, that currently the major drawback to using XAML in Xamarin.Forms solutions is the lack of tooling, notably a designer similar to Visual Studio’s WPF designer or Blend. Also, Xamarin.Forms solutions that include XAML must use a shared PCL project type rather than the Shared Project type. Despite this Xamarin.Forms is rapidly becoming a favourite choice among developers building mobile cross-platform applications.  Given the great deal of support that the Xamarin team gets from Microsoft, I have no doubt the Xamarin platform is already well positioned to take the lead in this space.

While we’re talking about solutions to “write once, run everywhere” idea, it’s worth mentioning the availability, in the form of a developer preview, of Microsoft’s ASP.NET vNext which exhibits the ability to run virtually on any platform: Windows, Linux, Mac. What that means is that soon we’ll be able to run web applications build on .NET stack on any platform.  More on that on a future article.

We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Claudiu Tomescu to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.

We want to hear your point! If you have any ideas, suggestions or any questions about our weekly blog, please contact us at: info@pointalliance.com.

Warm regards,

Point Alliance Team

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Create a better user experience

So often the user experience is ignored or its importance is marginalized.  A bad user experience is no different than a bad customer experience; a bad experience means that person is not likely to return or recommend your product or service.  Imagine shopping in a store and the shelving is maze like, aisles are too narrow, and goods are displayed haphazardly making it hard to find the items you wish to purchase.  It’s unlikely you would want to shop in that store again.  It’s no different when it comes to a user’s experience in adapting to new processes and systems. A bad user experience leads to resistance in accepting the changes despite any change management processes you may have in place.  This is true for all types of change whether you are implementing a new off-the-shelf product, custom building a new application or enhancing an existing application. 

User experience isn’t just about delivering a list of functional features or providing pretty graphics and colours.  It’s also about providing a user interface that makes it easy for the user to navigate, find what they need, and do what they want quickly and without fuss.  Accessibility is also an important component of the user experience.  Accessibility includes universal access for users with special needs such as screen readers as well as for users who require mobile access or have slow bandwidth connections. 

User experience is all about how a user feels and perceives when interacting with the system.  Perception of the value of a system, ease of use and efficiency in performing tasks are key components to a positive user experience.  The goal is to ensure the system achieves these fundamental objectives of a good user experience:  usable, credible, inspires loyalty, and attractive in appearance. The user experience doesn’t end with the implementation.  Follow up and obtain feedback on the user’s satisfaction formally with a survey or informally with conversations.  Feedback can provide valuable insight into what could be improved in future phases.

We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Jan Crowe to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.

We want to hear your point! If you have any ideas, suggestions or any questions about our weekly blog, please contact us at: info@pointalliance.com.

Warm regards,

Point Alliance Team

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Exploring NoSQL database. What are they and how do they work?

Most modern applications use databases to store data in what’s known as a Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS). RDBMS have evolved significantly since they were introduced in the 1970’s.  They do have some drawbacks with certain types of applications. The relational model is too heavy as it has to parse, lock, log, keep track of buffer pools and spawn a lot of threads.   In many types of applications however, RDBMS systems are perfect for the task.

NoSQL is non-relational, distributed with the ability to horizontally scale, high performance and highly scalable.

You would use a RDBMS if you need to have structured data, transactions, ACID capability, and simple or complex aggregations.

You would use NoSQL if you need high read/write throughput and unstructured or semi-structured data.  NoSQL databases are usually simpler to implement as you don’t need to have an architect to design a relational model. 

NoSQL databases provide schema free storage and allow indexing of individual fields for fast data retrieval.  Data is stored in JSON (Binary JSON to be more specific).  This means that you can store arrays and arrays inside arrays, making it very flexible for many types of applications.

If we were to build a simple blogging application that used NoSQL as a backend database. We would need to create a Collection (table) that contains the blog information like Title, Date Published, Content, array of meta tags, array of comments by anonymous users.

When loading a specific blog, you have all the data with one query.

A JavaScript like language is used to query NoSQL databases.  If you know JavaScript the syntax is easy to pick up.

An interesting fact about JavaScript: You can now write a complete end to end product using JavaScript.  Web Browser and/or Apache Cordova for mobile, back end API with NodeJs, Database system with NoSQL.

What really sets NoSQL apart is the ability to distribute the data to multiple servers known as data sharding.  Imagine that you have a multi-terabyte SQL database with millions or billions of rows of data in each table.  Querying this much data becomes very expensive and tricky on a RDBMS system.  You would need to have the right team with the right skillset and a big server or cluster of servers.

With a NoSQL solution, this is much easier.  You would need to buy a bunch of commodity servers with lots of memory, and an initial configuration to shard your data.  Your millions and billions of rows of data are now distributed between your physical commodity servers.  For example, let’s say that you have 6 servers/virtual machines and 6 billion rows in total.  Once your data sharded each server will contain 1 billion rows of data that it can query.  There are no changes to the application, your application still sees all 6 billion rows or data due to the underlying architecture of the NoSQL platform.  If this was a RDBMS, it would need to keep track of all 6 billion rows of data.

A NoSQL system can offer a lot of ease when dealing with large data to scale horizontally and a quick start because the relational model does not need to be defined upfront (the application logic defines database model). Some of the popular NoSQL database servers are MongoDB and CouchBase.

We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Fetbi Irsat to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.

We want to hear your point! If you have any ideas, suggestions or any questions about our weekly blog, please contact us at: info@pointalliance.com.

Warm regards,

Point Alliance Team

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Mobile App Development Trends

A recent IDC forecast of shipments of tablets and smartphones predicts that by 2017, 87% of connected device sales will be tablets and smartphones. More specifically, the forecast predicts that 5-inch devices will take the lead, followed by 7 and 9-inch tablets. Computer sales, on the other hand, are slowing down and the sales forecast is not encouraging. These forecasts underscore the direction that enterprises should focus their efforts on: mobile development and connected devices and how to get the most out of these investments. More and more businesses are adopting the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) model, and enterprises have to adjust their infrastructure to support this model. With that being said,this is not an easy task given the fast pace within the connected devices market. With respect to the line of business applications, enterprises need to start planning how to move them into the mobile space. This could be achieved by building either mobile-enabled web applications or native applications. Each of these options has its pros and cons, and they should be considered carefully ( this topic will be detailed in a future post- stay tuned!). For today, let’s focus on different options available for developing mobile native applications. More specifically we’re going to focus on the three major platforms out there right now: 1) iOS, 2) Android and 3) Windows Phone. The vendor behind each platform mentioned above has built the tools required to develop native applications for their respective platform: Apple has Xcode and Objective-C, Google has Android SDK and Java, and finally Microsoft has Visual Studio and Microsoft .NET Framework. 1) Out of the three vendors, Apple is considered to be the most advanced, having a head-start compared to the other two. The iOS has matured since its release back in 2008 (when it was named iPhone OS). Apple has been very keen to deliver state of the art tooling for building applications for the iOS platform, and the Xcode IDE along with the programming language Objective-C has certainly been up toexpectations! 2) Google has taken a different path with the Android platform, by open-sourcing the OS and adopting Java as the language for building applications. A vast majority of the Android developers did adopt Eclipse IDE as their development platform, using plug-ins and tools provided by Google to this end. 3) Microsoft is the newest entrant to the mobile market, and their Windows Phone OS is slowly gaining traction among the public application developers, but mostly among the commercial ones. Building applications for this platform relies heavily on their ubiquitous Visual Studio and Microsoft .NET Framework. This makes it very interesting to those businesses which already have an important investment in the Microsoft .NET platform. So, as a business with a big investment in the Microsoft .NET platform, the big question is: how to capitalize on this investment, and build applications not only for the Windows Phone, but for iOS and possibly Android as well? Fortunately, there is an answer to this question: Xamarin. Xamarin is a San Francisco, California based software company created in 2011 by Miguel de Icaza, one of the creators of cross-platform tools Mono for Android and MonoTouch. Xamarin further developed these tools and their current offering includes Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android which allows cross-platform development of native mobile applications for Apple iOS and Google Android platforms using C# programming language and Microsoft .NET Framework. As you can imagine, these tools are already very popular among .NET developers. Our team at Point Alliance feels that this is best suited approach given our expertise within the Microsoft .NET space. The latest addition to the cross-platform mobile development tools list is the Telerik Mobile Application Development Platform. This allows web, hybrid and native development, supported by an end-to-end mobile platform. Telerik is well known for its excellent web components suite as well as the Kendo UI suite for web development. This post is just a brief introduction to the world of mobile development, but please feel free to contact our team if you are interested in find out more about these various options or have a mobile development project idea. We hope you have found this week's edition of "To The Point" by Claudiu Tomescu to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology. We want to hear your point! If you have any ideas, suggestions or any questions about our weekly blog, please contact us at: info@pointalliance.com. Warm regards, Point Alliance Team

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Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services 2016 - The Future Looks Bright

There have been very few advances with SQL Server Reporting Services in the past few versions but 2016 looks like a significant jump in features making SSRS a competitive option for desktop and mobile users alike. According to Microsoft’s BI roadmap, their goal is “to put the power of data in the hands of every business and person on the planet”. Their objective is “to serve over a billion users with the Microsoft business intelligence (BI) platform”. It’s a large endeavour in a competitive market with numerous competitive BI offerings available today, but I think this time Microsoft may succeed. Their roadmap includes:

Harmonizing of report types (KPIs, Paginated reports, Interactive reports, Mobile reports and Analytical reports and charts)

Leveraging Reporting Services as the on-premises solution for BI report delivery

Publishing Power BI Desktop Reports on-premises for data discovery and interactive reporting

Unifying the Mobile BI experience with a single mobile application on Windows, iOS and Android for consumption of all report types

Creating symmetry across on-premises and cloud by harmonizing offerings and aligning technologies and tools across all parts of the BI platform

The biggest feature that excites me the most is Mobile Reports. Mobile reports are built on Datazen technology that Microsoft acquired earlier in 2015. Information is available anytime, anywhere is a promise BI vendors have been making long before mobile devices were used in any significant way. With the growth in mobile device usage, it’s become increasingly important that information is viewable on a mobile device. Responsive web design certainly works in some instances but not all. Reports that are designed specifically for mobile devices deliver the best user experience especially when viewing reports on phones and small screen tablets. Microsoft has stepped up to the plate with a platform and mobile app designed for that purpose and dynamically adjust the content to fit your screen or browser.

The second biggest feature that excites me is the new Web Portal that replaces the old Report Manager. In the previous version you could browse folders, view, export and print reports. With 2016 you can view all your KPIs, mobile reports and paginated reports in one place with most major browsers: Edge, Internet Explorer 10+, Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

The last set of new features that excites me are the new report themes and styles, new chart types and increased control over parameter prompts. These new features go a long way towards enhancing the ability to create dynamic, parameterized reports. I have been using the beta for the past month building up a demo site on the new Web Portal and everything looks pretty solid thus far. I am very much looking forward to the release of the final product in 2016. The next new feature I’ll be taking a deeper dive into is R integration for predictive analytics.