Our tech focus for 2023: PWA, Application Integration and Microservices

To help you make the right choices this year, we've listed 3 tech opportunities we firmly believe in, and which we will focus on with our team.

1. Progressive Web Apps

Progressive Web Applications (PWA) deliver a mobile website experience to users that feels very similar to a native mobile application. They’re built using common web technologies including HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Users can visit them in their browser, just as they would with a standard website. But PWA’s can be installed as well, from the browser, so that it appears next to other apps on the homescreen.

The concept of PWA’s was introduced by Google in 2015 aiming to build applications that had both the reach of the web and the rich capabilities of native apps. In general, these traits are what define progressive web applications:

• Discoverable: It can be found through search engines
• Responsive: It’s usable on any device with a screen and a browser
• Installable: It’s possible to have a PWA on a device home screen or app launcher
• Linkable: You can share a PWA by sharing the URL
• Offline availability: PWA’s can work offline
• Network independent: They work even with poor network connections
• Progressively enhanced: They provide basic functionality on older browsers and are fully-functional on new browsers
• Send notifications: PWA’s allow you to (re-)engage with users by sending notifications
• Secure connections: Connections are secured against any third parties trying to access sensitive data.

Since the introduction of PWA’s, the growth has been substantial. And as a tech investment, progressive web apps are finding their way onto the roadmap of an increasing number of companies. PWA’s deliver on several important requirements for multiple stakeholders, for example:

• For end users: fast, reliable and rich in features
• For product managers: progressively enhance experiences for newer browsers and devices while maintaining a functional and compatible baseline for older browsers and devices
• For development teams: leveraging modern web technologies and a simplified code base

Global brands like Spotify, Pinterest, Airbnb, Trivago and Uber already leverage the power of progressive web applications and have seen great results ranging from major decreases in loading times to increased engagement and higher conversion rates.

2. Application Integration

Companies have increasing numbers of software solutions running across their organisation: ERP, CRM, human resources, finances, IT or even industry-specific tools for supply chain management or warehouse management. Some of these applications have been around for years, growing steadily, while others have been built more recently or acquired through SaaS-vendors.

All of these applications consume and produce data in their own way, operating with their own specific workflows. But with increasing customer demands, businesses must be able to provide better services at higher speeds while decreasing costs to protect their margins.

This creates a growing need for application integration, which allows companies to optimise data exchange and workflows between software tools and across departments. Essentially, it’s an interplay of these components:

Application Programming Interface (API)

API’s allow different applications to communicate with each other. It’s a very popular method for integrating applications, data, and services.

Events and actions

An event is an occurrence within connected applications, such as a payment being received.

Events trigger certain actions or sequences in other applications that are specific to those applications. It can be the creation of a customer account or just updating a record or dataset.

Data mapping

Data mapping is the process of creating a correspondence between different data sources. Through data mapping you can define the relationship between the data elements in one data model to the data elements in another data model.

Application integration helps build more agile business operations by enabling individual applications to work with one another, increasing efficiency and effectiveness. Not only can this cut costs, it can generate valuable insights leading to better decision making.

3. Microservice Architecture

Microservices architecture is a way of structuring an application into multiple, loosely coupled (micro)services. Each of these services can be changed, deployed or scaled independently without compromising the others or the application as a whole.

The trigger for businesses to move to a microservice architecture is usually the lack of scalability provided by the current on-premise monolithic architecture. But a shift to distributed system does come with some challenges, such as increased complexity in infrastructure and organisation but when coupled with DevOps and automation practices like Continuous Integration (CI) and Delivery (CD), it has a myriad of benefits:

• Agile development cycles
• Faster release cycles
• Increased reliability
• Flexibility in scaling

Conclusion

Building applications isn't easy. And building the right application is even harder. We want to maximise the ROI our customers get from the applications we build.

We achieve this, not just by building great software, but by building the software that will add the most value for our clients. This often requires making tough decisions, at the business level and at the technical level. However, that’s where real and lasting value is made!