Deploy Friday

The OpenideaL origin story

Elroi, the CEO at Linnovate, explains the project’s origins started, interestingly enough, with the Israeli government, before pivoting to enterprises. “Enterprises realized that it’s a very good solution for them, and they adopted it, either to hear their consumers, or to hear their employees. It was very successful because at Linnovate we suddenly sold many downloads.”

Discuss, promote, and rate ideas easily

• Add ideas

Clearly defined workflows

What’s next for OpenideaL

• Increasing engagement using AI text analysis 

Says Zohar, “Our goal in OpenideaL is not just social activity. It’s about taking an idea from its very first form, like a grain, and watering and fertilizing it with the involvement of many people.”

Participate in an innovation-forward community by trying out OpenideaL today.

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Platform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

Bearer: good tidings for developers

How Pizzly does it

Taking the pain out of APIs

Pizzly is open source all the way

Deploy Pizzly on Platform.sh to connect to APIs quickly and easily.

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Platform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

Writing a TYPO3 Guidebook as a Collective Effort

The need for this guidebook

Every huge task is made up of smaller steps

The strength of the TYPO3 community contributed to their success

• Large, well-established, active, and diverse. Heather says, “We really couldn’t have done it without the subject-matter-experts, the incredible documentation team, and the people who blog about TYPO3.”

What’s next for TYPO3 in 2021

Deploy TYPO3 on Platform.sh today or buy the TYPO3 Guidebook on Amazon today.

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Platform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently.

Website maintenance is a common challenge, especially for agencies running dozens or even hundreds of sites. Platform.sh uses an internally-developed feature, Source Operations, to effectively manage its “fleets” of web applications.

Defining a fleet

Augustin Delaporte, Director of Enterprise and Fleets at Platform.sh, defines a fleet like this.“As soon as you start having more than one web application that you're managing, you’re running a fleet, basically. You're facing constraints, you're facing different programmatics that you have to solve, like how you maintain, upgrade, and implement new features to those applications.”

The need for Source Operations

Chris Yates, our other guest, makes the case that scaling is three-dimensional. And as he says, “The third dimension of scale is people.” When you scale up to a “fleet,” your DevOps team can quickly become overwhelmed with the various tasks of maintaining that fleet. 

As Chris explains, “The more people and the more organization structures you involve, the more complexity you get in terms of how you manage your fleet. Being able to coordinate responsibility for those who are actually actively maintaining an individual site is a challenge.”

Managing a fleet

Our guests say it doesn’t take that long to gather enough applications to be called a “fleet”—as few as five will do. Platform.sh’s Source Operations feature helps manage fleets by automating site maintenance, ensuring the web applications are secure, up-to-date, and appropriately customized for each instance.

Augustin explains how Source Operations works. “First of all, the workflow that we are running is Git-based. So if you want to update a specific code base on a project, you will have to use Git. And we map the entire architecture of your application, including the services and everything else in Git. So you define the different services with their version and their configuration, and you use Git to deploy and upgrade your site. When you start having a lot of projects, you need a mechanism to update them all at once, with the guarantee that what you're deploying can be tested and checked before it actually goes to production. And that's the entire idea of Source Operations.”

Maintenance, security, package upgrades, deployments, feature implementation, and user-facing content is a lot to handle, even for an experienced DevOps team. With Source Operations, you can automate with confidence.

View the Platform.sh Source Operations documentation.

Platform.sh

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Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:

Platform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

GraphQL is an open source, declarative language that you can use to source data from your APIs. In a backend landscape with disparate APIs that all need to be tied together, GraphQL is like a middle layer interface between them. 

Josh Oppenheim, a software engineer and one of our guests today, adds to this definition. “GraphQL allows you to declaratively say, ‘Hey, I want this data to look like this,’ and expect what you get back. So every time that call is made, it's always going to come back as that structure. You can also choose and add fields onto that.”

GraphQL benefits

GraphQL has a wealth of features that can make developer’s lives easier, including: 

• Reduced under- and over-fetching of data

Choosing GraphQL or REST

GraphQL and REST both fetch data, but there are differences between the two. “REST is a bit different from GraphQL,” Josh explains, “REST allows you to grab one resource by ID, but you don't get to decide what fields they are going to be, to put them together, or describe your data.” 

So how do you know when to use REST vs. GraphQL? Josh says,“Generally speaking, I think they both have their place.” He goes on to describe the differences in how each works. “REST has an over-fetching problem, right? So GraphQL, I make one call, I describe my data, I get it back. REST, I make X amount of calls, I get my data, I structure it myself, I put it where it needs to go, and I discard the rest. So using REST in this example means wasted data, time, and developer effort.”

Our other guest, Developer Advocate Lucas Santos, says that REST and GraphQL are complementary, not at odds. He often uses GraphQL for a very specific use case. “In my opinion, logs are the best use case for GraphQL.”

Learn Graph QL 

While you might be tempted to jump in and implement GraphQL right away, our guests advise a different approach. GraphQL has many online “playgrounds” where you can experience GraphQL, with no consequences. Josh says, “Learn the queries first before you try to implement it.”

Try GraphQL on Platform.sh with Gatsby or Strapi

Platform.sh

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Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:

Platform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Introducing Oracle Helidon

Helidon is an open source, microservice framework for writing applications. As our two Oracle guests today, Dmitry Kornilov and Dmitry Alexandrov explain, Helidon is named after the Greek symbol for a swallow, a bird that’s extremely fast and maneuverable; just like Helidon. 

Helidon helps developers with two “flavors”

Helidon has two development experiences, which our guests like to call “flavors”: Helidon SE and Helidon MP. While both are extremely fast, there are differences between the two.

• Helidon SE features three core APIs to create a microservice—a web server, configuration, and security—for building microservices-based applications.

Performance and support in one package

Helidon is a great choice if you are focused on a fully supported, performant application. Dmitry Alexandrov says, “Speed plus standards are the two key factors for us. That’s my definition of Helidon.”

• Performance: Helidon is small and light, so the memory footprint, startup time, and disk usage are also small. “We’re talking megabytes,” says Dmitry Alexandrov. The reactive APIs are what contribute to making Helidon so small and intuitive.

Use cases for Helidon

Dmitry Kornilov says the most common use cases they receive are organizations upgrading from monolithic applications to microservices, and are looking at different microservices frameworks. “Helidon is often their choice, mainly because of the strong standard support, so it’s guaranteed to work the same way on your application server and in your Helidon micro container. It guarantees that the behavior you had will be the same,” he adds.

For these use cases, what’s the benefit of using Helidon over Spring Boot or Quarkus? For one thing, Helidon is not an application server, it’s primarily focused on microservices. For another, Quarkus doesn’t have the support compatibility that Helidon has, and it tends to be more affordable than Spring.

Try Helidon on Platform.sh.

Platform.sh

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Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:

Platform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Elasticsearch: Easy, fast, and reliable

Elasticsearch is a highly scalable open source full-text search and analytics engine; it allows you to store, search, and analyze big volumes of data quickly and near real-time. As one of our guests, Jay Miller says, Elasticsearch is “the original idea of making search easy, fast, reliable.” Today with Jay Miller and Ricardo Ferreira, we'll discuss the success cases, tips, why you should use a search engine in your project, and where the project is headed in the future. 

Ingesting data into Elasticsearch

There’s no one right way to ingest data into Elasticsearch; our guests say it depends on your architecture. Jay Miller asks us to consider these questions.

• What does the data look like?

Jay Miller adds, “Decide what's going to be the easiest for you to maintain, whether you’re controlling your ingestion from within your project, or if you’re going to add a layer on to it to keep it separated from the rest of the project.”

Elasticsearch supports database aggregation

Database aggregation support in Elasticsearch is powerful because, as Ricardo says, “it allows us different contexts to request and execute aggregations.” He names different programming languages you can use, such as Java, Go, Python, C++, C Sharp, .Net, REST, and Kibana. Ricardo adds, “There’s also built-in support for custom aggregations.”

When not to use Elasticsearch

“Just because Elasticsearch is scalable,” explains Ricardo Ferreira, “it doesn't mean that it will play well with every single use case.” Elasticsearch may not be the best choice when handling transactions, “If you're looking for a highly transactional system that relies on ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) you probably will miss one of those letters there. You will have atomicity, isolation, and durability, but not consistency.”

Use Elasticsearch on Platform.sh

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Platform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Guest Anjuan Simmons and host Robert Douglass explore the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) experience in the tech world.

Facing additional burdens 

As a Black manager and leader with 25 years of experience in the technologist space, Anjuan carries more burdens than most. He lists:

• Being many people’s first Black manager

Anjuan sums it up, “Really, I have to do two jobs: the job I was hired to do, and the job of carrying these burdens.” 

Assess your progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion

Diversity can be a shallow statistic. Anjuan’s goal is to reach beyond diversity and into true belonging. Everyone has a part in making this happen, but especially those in charge of hiring. Anjuan says, “If you have hiring responsibility at a technology company, hire Black women.” 

He suggests three questions as a litmus test for companies who want to know how they’re doing in diversity, equity, and inclusion.

• How many Black women work here?

Anjuan explains his reasoning for asking these questions. “Black women are often the most disadvantaged when it comes to working in technology. So if you as a company can answer these questions well, that is the clearest indicator I've ever come across to really see how you're doing. If you can't answer those questions, especially as a manager, it’s likely you have a long way to go.” 

H.E.L.P.

Anjuan also provides an acronym he uses to illustrate how you can be a BIPOC ally in technology: H.E.L.P.

• History: Do the hard work of learning more about the history of racism.

Anjuan explains, “By understanding the history, by developing empathy, and by listening, you'll be able to provide help. And you'll be a part of what I think we can all do, which is exert that gravitational pull that will help us bend the arc of the moral universe closer to justice.”

Change your hiring practices to embrace diversity and belonging by visiting Black Girls Code or Code 2040.

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Platform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

MySQL is an open source, multi-user, and multi-threaded database management system. What’s more, it’s still growing, as our guests, Airton Lastori and Dave Stokes, longtime users of MySQL, emphasize.

We asked Airton and Dave about the newest, most exciting, and lesser-known features of MySQL. They responded enthusiastically. All quotes in this list from Dave Stokes.

• Recursive CTE:  as Dave explains it, this is “...an easy, painless way to write subqueries. They’re easier to comprehend than standard subqueries too.”

And others, including:

• Materialized columns

MySQL’s future

While they are huge MySQL fans, Airton and Dave do have some wishes for its future, such as improved replication, analytics, and help for beginners. Dave says, “It’s a steep learning curve to get someone to use a relational database. The more I look at the beginner stuff, we're not doing enough to help people get on their way to becoming database developers.”

MySQL isn’t going anywhere

As an extremely popular database management system, MySQL is embedded in the very fabric of the web, and it’s here to stay. Dave says, “MySQL is used by Booking.com, Ticketmaster, Twitter, Facebook, local YMCAs, big government organizations, and flight operations for the US Navy. MySQL is everywhere.”

Airton adds, “Our job is to make MySQL even easier to use and continue to be reliable. So we try to implement features that customers are looking for, that developers are looking for, and keep the roots for people that are already using MySQL as a database.”

Try MySQL on Platform.sh

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Platform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

We continue the Deploy Friday Language Spotlight series with the programming language Ruby. Our two guests, developers Emily Giurleo and Jason Charnes, talk about their love for Ruby and what to expect with the Ruby 3.0 release.

The benefits of Ruby

Ruby is a favorite to introduce newcomers to coding, along with Python and JavaScript. The father of the Ruby programming language, Yukihiro Maksumoto, likes to say, “Ruby sparks programming joy.” While he may be biased, Emily and Jason agree. “I think that's a really apt way to put it. It's really fun and satisfying to write Ruby. And I think it makes people want to program.” says Emily. 

Ruby sparks programming joy with its many benefits, such as:

• Straightforward syntax makes the language user-friendly and intuitive.

Jason goes into more detail, “Ruby was really easy to understand while I was learning new concepts. It simplified things for me because the syntax just doesn't get in your way. That really sparked my love of programming and took it to the next level. So for me, I think Ruby is special because of the joy I get writing it. It’s syntactically very user-friendly.”

What’s new with Ruby 3.0

With Ruby 3.0 coming down the pipeline, there’s a lot for developers to get excited about. Emily and Jason tell us what they’re ready for.

• New syntax

Try Ruby on Platform.sh to experience programming joy for yourself.

Platform.sh on social media

Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:

Platform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.