devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: web application development

  • Vercel Acquires Turborepo to Gain Build System

    Vercel Acquires Turborepo to Gain Build System

    Vercel today announced it has acquired Turborepo, a provider of a build system for JavaScript and TypeScript applications that provides developers with access to an easy-to-use monorepository for their code.

    In the wake of that acquisition, the command line interface (CLI) for accessing Turborepo will now be available under an open source license.

    Jared Palmer, creator of Turborepo and other popular open source projects including Formik and TSDX, will continue working on accelerating Turborepo’s capabilities as the new leader of a build performance team at Vercel.

    The goal is to move existing users of the Turborepo cloud service to a Vercel platform for building applications using the Next.js framework, which makes it possible to build web applications based on the React library for creating user interfaces that enable both static site generation (SSG) and server-side rendering (SSR).

    Palmer said monrepositories such as Turborepo not only make it easier for developers to manage builds but also reduce the amount of time required to process those builds using a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.

    Rival build systems are also much more complex to configure and manage, which Palmer said is a primary reason many developers have not yet set up their own mononrepositories.

    As the number of applications that organizations want to build and deploy in the digital business transformation era increases, the focus on developer productivity is intensifying. Rather than having to maintain a complex build system, Turborepo is designed to be simple to configure. As a result, more developers can reduce build times by as much as 50%, noted Palmer.

    In effect, front-end developers are able to more easily become full-stack developers by combining that build system with the Next.js framework, he added.

    DevOps teams will need to adjust to applications capable of providing richer application experiences without relying as much on backend infrastructure. That shift has implications for everything from the amount of network bandwidth consumed to the performance of web applications. The Vercel platform employs caching, routing and a React framework to optimize application performance in a way that reduces the dependency on backend infrastructure to optimize application performance.

    As web application development continues to evolve, the overall rate at which they web apps are built should increase significantly. Naturally, DevOps teams will need to consider the implications of having more applications move through DevOps pipelines and the need to continuously update those after they are deployed.

    It’s not clear whether or how much DevOps teams will nudge developers toward frameworks such as Next.js to develop web applications that might not tax backend infrastructure as much as previous generations of applications. In effect, developers can take advantage of frameworks that enable them to treat the underlying IT infrastructure as if it were serverless whenever possible with tools that have a familiar JavaScript construct. Vercel claimed there are already more than 30,000 sites running Next.js in production at organizations like Airbnb, Hulu, Nike, Ticketmaster and Uber.

    One way or another, it’s clear that the way web applications are being built is fundamentally changing. The only issue now is determining to what degree the rest of the IT organization is prepared to absorb that level of change.

  • Adobe Adds Tools for Building Custom Applications

    Adobe Adds Tools for Building Custom Applications

    Adobe this week launched a series of tools intended to make it easier to build custom applications that can be deployed on a serverless computing platform on the Adobe Experience Cloud.

    Announced at the online Adobe Developers Live event, the Project Firefly framework promises to make it easier for developers to build cloud-native applications that leverage the open source Apache OpenWhisk serverless computing framework.

    The Firefly framework will make it easier for developers to, for example, invoke Adobe Analytics capabilities from within a custom application using functions, said Jason Woosley, vice president of developer experience and commerce for Adobe.

    Adobe this week also launched React Spectrum, an open source collection of libraries and tools for building interactive applications using the React framework. Based on JavaScript, React Spectrum makes it easier to build front-end interactive applications in a way that scales consistently.

    Finally, Adobe added Adobe Experience Platform Launch Server Side, which makes it easier to collect data via Adobe Web and Mobile software development kits (SDKs).

    Woosley said interest in building custom applications on Adobe Experience Platform has accelerated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations of all sizes moving timetables for digital business transformation initiatives forward to engage customers online. Those initiatives frequently begin with marketing applications that are extensions of the software that Adobe makes available via its cloud platform, he said.

    Once those applications are built they also typically need to be integrated with any number of back-end systems that act as systems of record for the business. Those tasks have become easier for developers to accomplish using any number of application programming interfaces (APIs) that providers of those platforms expose.

    Most of the digital business applications are being built by professional developers employing best DevOps practices, Woosey said. As the Adobe strategy for enabling developers to build applications evolves, Adobe it evaluating to what degree it needs to embed DevOps capabilities within its cloud platform, he noted.

    The Adobe Experience Cloud platform provides organizations with access to a series of applications that they can extend using Firefly, which eliminates the need to build every custom application from the ground up. As digital business transformation projects become a higher priority, the rate at which organizations need to build and deploy these applications has increased to the point where many of those organizations require a systematic approach based on best DevOps practices to build, deploy and update applications at scale.

    It’s not clear to what degree the rise of digital business transformation initiatives will eventually act as a forcing function for adopting DevOps more widely within organizations. However, given the strategic importance of many of these projects, it appears all but inevitable that most organizations will need to modernize the way applications are built and deployed if they hope to remain relevant. In fact, embracing best DevOps practices is nothing less now than a matter of survival for many of those organizations.