Many companies are facing challenges retaining employees with traditional IT expertise, so they’re not able to increase their IT staff when they’re focused on filling in the gaps after IT pros leave. Companies that do plan to increase staff are often targeting specific IT skills rather than general expertise.

A new kid on the block has appeared, offering an alternative to desktop operating systems such as OpenFin and electron: welcome Glue42. We had the opportunity to use their toolkit and went to work. Given the breadth and depth of the technology as well as the industry’s struggle with last mile app integration, we started with Glue42’s window management functionality. As we delved into the toolkit, our initial skepticism dissipated.

As technology evolves, websites grow increasingly complex and with that complexity comes new challenges. Traditional monolithic architectures are often hard to update quickly. They can become difficult to maintain and scale and must rely on a single stack. We all know this scenario is far from ideal as apps can become quickly outdated this way.

Enter micro frontends. Micro frontends are a way of structuring the UI of a site around a series of independent fragments, extending the benefits of microservice architecture to frontend development. The key to micro frontends is to think about the application as being composed of a collection of features which are owned by independent teams. By breaking up a large monolithic site into smaller pieces, developers can combat many of the problems that arise from added complexity. 

As a CTO I am always looking to find technology and approaches that better serve my clients, such as PWA’s (Progressive Web Apps). PWAs formalize what we have been building for our clients for several years now, and that is highly immersive and fluid experiences for the user. They are backed by Google with an initial mobile slant, but, with Chrome desktop, it’s possible to run them on the desktop.  Microsoft is joining the effort and will soon allow PWAs to be run within Microsoft Edge.  Given the number of browsers that are being used today, for PWAs on the desktop to gain sufficient traction, each will need to support hosting PWAs, otherwise the user is limited to two options, Chrome or Edge.

A recent article in Information Week, ‘10 Things You Need to Know About Kubernetes’ discusses why Kubernetes is important, how it affects day-to-day IT operations, and its future role in enterprise IT. 

Here at Eikos, we have started using Vue.js in our recent projects with much success. Although it is a relatively new framework, it’s lightweight and easy to integrate into existing applications, while still being a powerful tool when building both small components and sophisticated single-page applications. We recently published a blog post comparing the latest front-end technologies – including Vue, Angular 2+, and React – and explained why Vue.js has become our first choice for new projects. We like to think of the Vue ecosystem as having adopted the best parts of existing frameworks, while leaving clunky and outdated methodologies behind. In this article, we’ll discuss the technical aspects of Vue and the benefits it offers to developers when starting a new project or expanding on an existing endeavor.

Oh, what a year it's been! Watch our video for a year-end recap and exciting news coming up in 2018. And, don’t forget to scroll down. We’re sharing our five most popular blog posts of 2017 with you. Enjoy the read.

On behalf of the entire Eikos Partners team, thank you for your continued support. We look forward to working with you in the New Year.

When evaluating options for a user interface JavaScript framework for your next application, it’s impossible to ignore the crowd favorites: Angular 2+, React, and Vue. Eikos developers have experience with all three frameworks and are familiar with the benefits and limitations of each. Although Vue is the new kid on the block, we have seen great results using it in our recent projects. In addition to being lightweight, versatile, and easy to navigate during the build, Vue is capable of handling complex single-page applications and lends itself to impressive performance gains.

Digital transformation is hampered by misalignment between IT and the rest of the organization.

As developers, we typically spend a large portion of our time building software infrastructure to make building the business applications easier and quicker. The challenge when building this infrastructure is that it is time consuming if you do it the right way and therefore risks not being reusable across projects. Same for the developers’ focus when building applications. Shouldn’t this be on the business functionality and not the plumbing?