Rise of the Developer Platforms – A Paradigm Shift

But when the World Wide Web became more universal, all this started to change. More software was being shifted to the web. This era demanded more of robust server-side coding as the number of users during runtime would significantly be higher.

Today the landscape for the developers is very different. Some of the factors which have caused this change are:

• Costumer behaviour
• Cultural shift towards mobile work policies
• Dawn of cloud computing as the de-facto model

The end users (customers) are more adept and are addicted to the mobile and distributed work policies, which require their applications to be accessible from anywhere at any time. The availability of more software-as-a-service (SaaS) through internet has contributed to this change. And of course, SaaS has seen a wide acceptance as it has directly shown an increase in software development velocity and hence in developer productivity too.

Today developers need to develop software that deals with multiple types of access points – mobile devices and desktops. The code needs to be built in a way which is suitable for the application to run in resource constrained and slow mobile devices. At the same time, it should also be suitable enough to run on traditional desktop computers and laptops. Multiple access points at any instance make it necessary that the server side should be able to handle multiple types of customers. All this must be in real time and runtime without crashing. Server-side coding and client-side coding is a must for developers now and these in turn should be interoperable. Third party integration, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+, is also a necessary feature. The end-user expects 24×7 accesses to the apps. This further necessitates capturing networking issues also during the development stages.

Combine the above requirements, and you need a versatile team of developers and some maybe with two heads and four hands!!!

The developers need to do server side programming as well as client side programming and maybe in more than one language, deployable on more than one OS and accessible through more than one type of internet enabled device – feature phone, smart phone, iPad, laptop, desktop etc. If you go by the traditional way, developers need to manage many types of environments through the application development cycle to be able to meet the above requirements. This reduces developer productivity significantly.

There is a case for something more magnanimous and righteous such as a developer platform. Developer platforms and IDEs can have non-app specific code built-in by default. While even the non-app specific codes cannot be embedded as a ‘cookie-cutter’ feature, it can to a large extent reduce the redundant part of the development cycle – redundancy being segregated based on different industries. These will directly increase the productivity of developers.

Now push this case onto the cloud and you have further positioned yourself for a case of hosted developer platforms. Cloud, which can bring in many advantages such as cost saving, automation, and scalability, offers a chance to present platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for developing and deploying applications. The developer productivity is directly increased multiple times by using these robust developer platforms. It lets them concentrate entirely on core product code and not worry about managing servers, scalability & reliability during heavy loads, OS patching or deployment. They do not have to worry about maintaining different developer environments throughout the application lifecycle.

So what remarkable features and services must a developer platform provide?

Integrated application development environment: This essentially means that Developing, Testing, Deployment, Debugging, Maintenance, Storage and Security are all provided on the same environment.

Built-in Scalability, Reliability and Security: This means that the developer platforms must be able to handle sudden surge in application users and be reliable enough to provide back-ups and manage secured data transfers among different data centres during heavy loads.

Connectivity to multiple data sources: As a natural offset of the solution that developer platforms promise to provide, they should have seamless connectivity to multiple data sources, to be able to provide a versatile development environment.

Secured Collaboration between teams: Any development work is divided into teams and the final modules are delivered by various teams for the final release. A developer platform must ensure collaboration as a feature, where different teams can share information and experiences especially during compilation, testing and bug fixing activities. At the same time the source codes must be packaged such that the hackers do not get in during source code transfer. The storage and reuse capability for source codes should also be a feature of the developer platforms.

What do you think?