Open Source Web Application Development: Challenges and Trends
In a distributed development environment where communities of developers contribute to large-sized projects, open source platforms have raised the bar of sharing code, quality of output, and license-free access, among several others. According to thought leaders, the passion for open source development work should come with the right quantum of understanding the above-mentioned factors at an individual, enterprise, and organizational level.
A large number of companies adopting open source platforms face awareness, education, and associated knowledge transfer challenges. In such a scenario, companies must adopt open source platforms to shape the configuration of their workforce in terms of understanding the nuances. They must also hire talent that has a track record of working and contributing to the open source services at any point in their respective careers.
Open source development platforms are known to have optimized the usage of technology and resources. Programmers are authorized to access, review, and modify the source code at will. Such a setup leads to freely-flowing ideas and keeps the development environment abuzz with maximum participation from community developers. On the other hand, open source standards imply there is no hidden bug in the development environment, which essentially leads to a stable development platform. Nevertheless, any possible bug in an open-source environment can potentially be spotted by individual contributors.
Open Source Web Application Development: Challenges
One of the challenges of open source framework is the absence of license. Legal experts have argued that open source projects must have at least some form of software license. One more cause of concern for an open source development company is that when the source code generated by multitude of developers is merged to the system, it must behave like a single entity altogether. With newer trends and better calls for overall code integration, OpenStack, Ubuntu, and Joomla have been accepted enterprises as some of the regulated platforms by the open access development community.
Turnkey vs Customized Open Source Development Solutions
Today enterprises are looking ahead to offer turnkey solutions as against customized solutions. A typical turnkey open source web application development project is adopted by stakeholders whose emphasis is around building scalable and low-cost systems that are elastic. The architectures are also standardized and the developers do not have to worry about the infrastructure around which they are coding. On the contrary, a customized open source development project incurs more costs during roll-out and delivery.
Cloud Computing and Open Source Web Application Development
Driven by cloud computing, open source web application development has made huge strides. Today, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services are three market-leading platforms hosted on cloud. In 2017, organizations are also putting more emphasis on investing in open access services through public providers that deliver through cloud. This will help optimize costs and reduce time-to-market.
Applications built in open source development environment and hosted on cloud, reside outside the firewall of the respective organization’s IT infrastructure. Hackers know it is easy to capitalize on security vulnerabilities of such applications. According to a study, such attacks based on known vulnerabilities in open source would increase year-on-year by 20 per cent, from 2016 to 2017. However, AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Azure environments can potentially quell security fears, given the layers of security that are attached with their respective underlying source code.
Latest Adoption by Open Source Development Players: OpenStack and Containers
Open source technologies have a long history. Linux, MySQL, and the Apache Web Server are among the most popular and successful open source technologies that are commonly used by the organizations. However, over the years, open source technologies have taken a big leap with newer technologies or components. In 2017, vendors have started offering advanced APIs that pave the way for swift open source web development with rapid feature rich deployments into the ecosystem. Code-wrappers and containers leverage highly portable assets or resources, and allow for efficient transition around the open source ecosystem.
Of late, automation has become more significant with respect to open source development. OpenStack — open source web application development software — is being increasingly used for full stack automation and its ability to empower both public as well as private clouds.
The Open source technologies are evolving and are expected to be used mostly by larger private and public cloud operators, whether they are SaaS, enterprise or service providers.
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