Application Modernization leveraging Modern UI Frameworks

Most software-driven enterprise that use and support legacy applications to run their business-critical process face an unmitigated risk of a legacy burden. These applications are typically incompatible with technologies like cloud, analytics, and mobility, limiting enterprises from achieving innovation and success in the disruptive, digital world.  

Application Modernization is one of the things enabling organizations to adopt current technologies and implement cloud services through a process of refactoring business applications to align better with current business needs. Many C-suite executives acknowledge the fact that legacy application modernization is a high priority for many business imperatives. The business demand for application modernization service is estimated to increase from $6.87 billion in 2017 to $16.67 billion by 2022. Yet, businesses are unsure of the right strategy and the correct way to move forward. 

While choosing an application, it’s essential to be aware of the different conventional approaches, their pitfalls as well as the quick fixes. 

Choosing the Best Framework for Web Development 

As web application is evolving, web development is turning out to be challenging. Javascript frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular offer tools and code that allow users to create potent web applications. Adopting the right framework speeds up the development time and simplifies the development process allowing users to build sophisticated and modern user interfaces on the web. 

React 

Created and managed by Facebook, React is an effective, declarative, and resilient open-source JavaScript library. It is used for creating simple, fast, and scalable frontends of web applications. Currently, over 220,000 live websites are using React along with the industry giants such as Apple, Netflix, and Paypal. 

When compared to other popular front-end frameworks like Angular and Vue, React is much easier to learn. It helps to build a rich user interface and allows developers to write their components, reuse codes, and create a modularized design. This makes apps easier to maintain and build upon, enabling complex infrastructure that is more easily developed and scaled.  

React’s Virtual DOM implementation and rendering optimizations make it fast, which significantly reduces page load time, making it SEO friendly. Developers using React have to make their own design choices. It updates often and sometimes can be challenging to stay with the latest documentation.  

Vue 

Vue is the newest JS framework, established with features to overcome the complications that developers face with Angular and React. It is a progressive framework for JavaScript used to build single-page applications just with the knowledge of HTML, both desktop and mobile app development with the Electron framework and more complex web interfaces. 

Vue is adopted by industry giants such as Adobe, Behance, Alibaba, Gitlab, and Xiaomi. It offers detailed documentation that helps create a low learning curve for developers. It uses virtual DOM for faster and better performance in comparison to the other frameworks. Though Vue applications integrate easily into an existing framework with no negative effect on the system, it offers fewer resources than React and Angular. 

Angular 

Angular is the popular framework of Javascript that uses DOM and is best suited for the one-page applications where content is occasionally updated. It has a good range of features, empowering developers from templates to testing utilities. 

Developers can use HTML as the template language and extend HTML syntax for expressing the application components.  AngularJS data binding and dependency removes much of the need for coding. It uses TypeScript which provides great support for type checking and another external tooling.  

Angular is supported by Google and is a reliable framework to learn. Its language service allows for autocomplete inside of component external HTML template files, speeding up the development. Because of the many features of this framework, it slows down the performance as compared to React and Vue. 

Building Desktop Applications with Electron Framework 

Electron framework, developed by GitHub, enables developers to write cross-platform desktop applications using technology languages such as JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. The framework combines front end and back end components for web applications to develop the desktop GUI applications. The electron framework does this by combining Chromium, for the front end, and Node.js for the backend requirement, into a single run–time environment. 

Open-source developers, startups, and established companies highly use Electron to build desktop applications. The reasons why it has become so popular are: 

• The electron framework always comes with the latest version of Node.js and Chromium. Thus developers can use cutting edge platform features supported by both.  

• It comes with several APIs that have access to operating system features.  

• The framework delivers direct access to Node.js API, NPI module from web pages within the application. 

• Electron doesn’t require any extra skillset besides HTML, Javascript, and CSS. Hence no need to invest in learning a new programming language. The existing development team can easily gel with electron technology and start with building apps. This saves a huge amount of time and cuts down costs. 

iLink’s Application Modernization Strategy and Service 

Modernization isn’t just limited to legacy applications or outdated software that are on the verge of expiration. It is a modern approach for next-Gen applications that strengthens both customer and business-centric processes. iLink helps organizations to achieve the flexibility and agility necessary for digital transformation and cloud rearchitecting. 

Learn more about our services to accelerate your digital transformation.