Open Source Tools Options in Web Application Development

Tool

Overview 

Advantages

AngularJS

AngularJS is 100% JavaScript, 100% client-side, and compatible with both desktop and mobile browsers maintained by Google for creating web applications. A complete solution for rapid front-end development, with no additional plugins/frameworks required to build a data-driven web application

• The capability of creating Single Page Application in an immaculate and maintainable manner
• Unit testable code
• Separation of concern by using dependency injection 
• Follows the MVVM pattern. Views - HTML pages, and Controllers - JavaScript do the business processing.
• Applications run on all browsers and smartphones, including Android and iOS-based phones/tablets.

NodeJS

The cross-platform runtime environment for server-side java-script applications development. 

Event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient package ecosystem.

• Network Application and                               Asynchronous Events
• Multiplayer Game Applications
• Data-Intensive Real-time Apps
• File Uploading Tools
• Process Monitoring Tools                     
• Many to Many Instant Chat Apps         
• HTTP Web Server                
• Streaming Server  
• Communication Hubs                           
• DNS Server, Static File Server, TCP Server

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is the most popular front-end framework, developed and released in 2011 by ex-employees of twitter. Sleek, intuitive, and powerful mobile first front-end framework for web development. Uses HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Even developers with little knowledge of CSS to design great user interfaces

• Provides an easy way to create responsive websites
• Easy to customize UI layouts
• Allows rapid prototyping
• Cross-browser compatible with most standard browsers.
• Extremely popular on the web. 

Apache CXF

CXF implements the JAX WS APIs which make building web services accessible JAX WS

encompasses many different areas for generating WSDL from Java classes and vice-versa. 

Provider API allows creating messaging receiving server endpoints. Dispatch API allows sending raw XML messages to server endpoints.

• Embeddable
• High performance
• Easy configuration
• Intuitive and easy to use
• Clean separation of front ends from the core code.
• Data formats support
• Data bindings support
• Protocol bindings support
• Multiple kinds of transport support
• Multiple Programming Languages Support
• WS and related specifications support
• Tools for code generation and WSDL validation
• Flexible deployment

Spring Boot

Spring Boot is an open-source Java-based framework used to create a micro Service developed by the Pivotal Team and used to build stand-alone and production-ready spring applications. Follows the “Opinionated Defaults Configuration” approach to avoid configuration to improve Development, Unit Test, and Integration Test Process.

• Create stand-alone Spring applications. Embed Tomcat, Jetty servers along with the JAR file creation
• Simplify Maven configuration
• Provide production-ready features like metrics, health checks 
• No requirement for XML configuration
• Easy deployment and scalability features
• Compatible with Containers like Docker 

Java 8

Java 8 upgrade to the Java programming model and a coordinated evolution of the JVM, Java language, and libraries. Productivity, ease of use, polyglot programming, security, and performance are key features.

Java ME 8 is used for developers to build new services for the IoT.

• Lambda expressions - facilitates functional programming and simplifies the development a lot.
• Method and Functional references – Method interfaces provide the ability to add new approaches to the interfaces without breaking the existing implementation.
• Stream API - A sequence of elements from a source that supports aggregate operations
• Date Time API - Divided into three formats immutable, domain-driven and separation of chronologies
• Optional class - A container object which may or may not contain a non-null value
• Nashorn, JavaScript Engine - Aim to implement a lightweight, high-performance JavaScript runtime in Java with a native JVM

DevOps (for Build and Operations – Jenkins, SonarQube, Git)

DevOps accelerate software delivery & Increase responsiveness. Shift-Left to get early feedback. Improve the quality of software code and deployments. Reduce Capex & Opex expenses

• Time to Market - Deploy faster. Deploy often. 
• Developer self-service - Build and test against ‘production like’ systems.
• Increase Quality - Increase test coverage using SonarQube.
• Environment  - Dev and Test environments Virtualization by using pipelines
• Deployment Automation - Minimize deployment-related downtime. Minimize rollback of deployments
• Defect Resolution - Increase the ability to reproduce and fix defects. Minimize ‘mean-time-to-resolution’ (MTTR). 
• Collaboration - Development and Operations collaboration makes to reduce challenges.