Deploy Friday

We continue our Language Spotlight series with Java, an object-oriented programming language that has shaped the course of the internet in enormous ways. Today we speak with two Java champions, Monica Beckwith and Geertjan Wielenga, to discuss Java’s impact so far as well as its course for the future.

What is a Java Champion?

Since we have two Java champions as guests today, let’s start off with defining a Java champion. Monica and Geertjan describe the term as a collection of expert knowledge, a sign that you have contributed to and are committed to the Java community, and last but not least, a group of friends. Geertjan adds, “It’s a badge of honor as well.”

With their extensive Java experience, Monica and Geertjan are well-positioned to define what has made Java one of the top languages in the world throughout its 25-year history.

Java’s defining features and attributes

Java is a mature language supported by a huge and vibrant community, with extensive information and documentation available to all levels of learners. Our two guests also emphasize that Java has evolved with the times, and that this adaptability is a defining characteristic of the language. They list others, like:

• Portability

When not to use Java

While Java is a great choice for many instances, our guests acknowledge that there are cases where it’s best to use another language. Geertjan says Java isn’t great for front-end work, and smaller applications, “... in particular, if you're creating a shopping cart, or you're creating some hotel booking system, or some other relatively lightweight project, Java is probably the wrong language.” 

Our guests’ final words on Java

Java is a mature, approachable, adaptable language that’s been extremely influential to the world of development. Geertjan sums it up. “Java is a vibrant community of enthusiastic and friendly people all over the world. If you want to learn a language to get started in programming, Java is definitely a good choice to make.”

Try Java on Platform.sh

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Today we continue our Language Spotlight series. PHP is the most-used server-side web development language in the world, and it’s also one of the few to be purely open source. We speak with two PHP 8.0 Release Managers, Sara Golemon and Gabriel Caruso, about the current status of PHP and the PHP 8.0 release.

Exciting PHP features and benefits

It’s hard to understate how important PHP is for the Internet. It has been in constant, evolving use online for 26 years — the Internet itself has only existed for 38.  Some of its most popular benefits are that it’s easy to get started and easy to use (plus, its stellar documentation). But it also has exciting features and improvements that many people may not know about. Sara Golemon lists several of them for us. 

• The type system:“Strict types really brought the type system to the forefront of people's minds, because they can actually use types that they pass around on a daily basis much better than they could before.”

PHP has other, more abstract characteristics that our guests enjoy, such as its flexibility. As Sara puts it, “PHP allows you to shoot yourself in the foot. PHP is not built on guide rails. PHP is designed to say, ‘Here are a bunch of tools, do something with those tools, and build something with these tools.’”

For Gabriel, he enjoys PHP’s ability to wrangle complex projects. “I think that one of the advantages of PHP for the web is it’s very easy to structure a large project, even if there are multiple different paradigms in each part of it.” 

Sara sums up PHP’s importance and influence on the web well. “You should learn PHP if you're going to work on the web, period. PHP was born on the web, it was built for the web, it literally grew up with the web. It is part of the web's DNA, and it does the web really, really, really, really well.”

To experience how PHP does the web, try PHP 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.

The digital accessibility umbrella is broad

Digital accessibility means different things to different people. Most people, on hearing the term, think of people with disabilities, such as being deaf or blind. But our two experts, Nic Steenhout and Carie Fisher, make it clear the digital accessibility umbrella encapsulates much more. It also includes people who:

• Have ADHD or other cognitive issues — such as with memory, concentration or information processing

Nic Steenhout sums it up, “Regardless of the format, digital accessibility all comes down to the same thing — making sure that what we're building is workable, perceivable, understandable, and operable by people with disabilities, and everybody else as well."

Digital accessibility benefits everyone, including you

Our experts also make the point that digital accessibility is not necessarily limited to the group it’s intended for; what is beneficial for one group can benefit another. Nic gives an example, “Plain language and transcripts are easier to understand for people that have cognitive impairments, but they also benefit non-native English speakers.”

Nic adds that by factoring accessibility into your site, you broaden your audience as well. “Are people accessing your site through a keyboard, a mouse, Speech Input, Alexa? You don't know. And because you don't know, you have to plan for all that.”

Make your content more accessible on the frontend and backend

Making room for accessibility requires a dose of both imagination and empathy; as Nic points out, “We’re all only temporarily abled.” On the frontend, our experts highlight suggestions for putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and improving your site’s accessibility. 

• Use proper markup.

They have suggestions for the backend too:

• Write clean, readable code 

Read the web content accessibility guidelines to find out how you can make your site more accessible for everyone.

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In our new mini-series, Language Spotlight, we’ll take a tour of every language that Platform.sh supports. Today our focus is on JavaScript, as we delve into what’s new and exciting in the space, asynchronous coding, and the advantages of Node.js with two JavaScript experts and Software Engineers, Jessica and Austin Keener.

Understanding asynchronous JavaScript

JavaScript can be different from other asynchronous languages. As Austin Keener explains, “In JavaScript, you say, ‘Hey, make this request.’ Whenever you're creating these contexts that need to be actually executed, they're all going into this queue that gets picked up and gets run back on that thread. So while it is single threaded, you still get all of the asynchronous aspects of it, because each piece is broken up, instead of being this one long, continuous thread of execution that needs to happen. And that can cause some question marks to pop up for people, because it's different than the majority of other language asynchronous models.”

Exciting JavaScript developments 

Our other expert guest, Jessica, names the three things that excite her most about the JavaScript space right now. She includes:

• Adding query selectors and query select all

She adds, “As JavaScript is moving further and further into platform jQuery, pushing yourself to learn more than just jQuery and starting to understand some of the underlying native stuff that is supported now is going to be a great advantage.”

Node.js promotes consistency

Austin Keener shares what he thinks is the biggest advantage of using server-side language Node.js. “Developers are going to be able to understand, read, debug, and contribute to every single one of our repositories no matter where it is in the stack.” He adds that the large amount of available libraries helps, too, “It allows you to have consistency in your language or in your repositories, among your developers, and a shared understanding that you can speak to.”

If you learned something new about JavaScript today, and you’re excited to get started, try Node.js 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.

In this episode, we talk with our guest Mike Pirog about Lando, the free and open source local development tool. Mike is the Co-Founder of Tandem, a full service digital agency in the PHP space, and the maker of Lando. Lando offers a high degree of flexibility for common setups, and it’s now fully integrated with Platform.sh. 

How to use Lando

Lando is based on Docker as the underlying engine, and it’s primarily for PHP projects, but it can be used for any kind of project. As Mike defines Lando, “The general idea of Lando is I have a Git repository. And I've checked in a configuration file that tells Lando what kinds of things I need to run, develop, and test my project. And the idea is you should be able to sort of Git clone that repository down and run Lando start and end up with all the things that you need to run your project and develop your project locally on your computer.”

The two main layers of Lando

Mike explains that Lando has two main layers.

• Docker compose wrapper — “... collapses the configuration to the most relevant things, but also sort of leaves some exposition for the Docker compose stuff. But it also allows you to do some other things like configuring proxy routes, which are essentially like nice URLs to access your services. That Docker out-of-the-box can’t do.”

Standout Lando features

There are alternatives to Lando in the local development space, and they have their merits. But Lando has something that makes it stand out to its 11,000 monthly users. Mike believes Lando’s balance between ease of use and flexibility make the difference. “Lando’s breadth and depth is what’s allowed it to become especially popular,” says Mike. “If you want to just have a two line configuration file and have Lando manage everything, it'll do that. But if you have a complicated application that has very weird requirements, Lando can probably handle that as well.”

Try Lando with Platform.sh documentation: https://docs.lando.dev/config/platfor...

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Adding more complexity to international privacy law

A recent ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union invalidates the US EU Privacy Shield, which has many implications for data rules around the GDPR. More than 5,000 U.S. companies rely on Privacy Shield to conduct trans-Atlantic trade in compliance with the GDPR. We talk with a team of legal experts to clarify what this means for you and your international business.

Comprehensive data protection for European residents

GDPR stands for “General Data Protection Regulation,” which governs how businesses that interact with and collect data of European residents can be managed. It regulates everything from:

• Why an organization collects data

Privacy Shield allowed for data flow between the EU and the US

Under the GDPR, for you to transfer the data, there’s a determination of whether a particular country is “adequate” in terms of data protection.

Brandi Bennet, one of our guests, helps us define adequacy. “Europe has high standards for data protection: your data protection rights are considered a human right. What adequacy really means is, when they transfer the data to another country, are those country’s laws as good as our laws? Do they treat and protect data as robustly and as strong as we do?”

The United States does not meet The EU’s adequacy requirements. The Privacy Shield treaty provides a framework to nonetheless allow for data flow between the EU and the US. With the ruling, we’re no longer legally allowed to use Privacy Shield, which leaves businesses wondering what practical measures can they take to protect their data? Some suggestions from our guests are:

• Data encryption and minimization

You can read more about international privacy law on the International Association of Privacy Professionals website.

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Defining and standardizing microservice architecture

Microservices break down application development into independent functional components. One of our guests, Emily Jiang of IBM, defines a microservice as “a piece of software that can do one thing and do one thing very well.” For building good microservice architecture, she recommends following the 12 Factor App methodology. The 12 principles in this methodology were created in an effort to guide development and help standardize Java microservices. Emily identifies some of them, such as:

• Externalize your configuration

Another guest, Roberto Cortez of Red Hat, agrees with her definition, and also adds, “I believe that every team or company has their own definition of microservices. So when people sometimes say, ‘Whoa, how big should a microservice be? Should it be 10k bytes or this many lines of code?’ It doesn't really matter, right? What actually matters is what you do with it in your own organization.”

The monolith to microservices “lift and shift” can be tricky

Roberto makes it clear that moving from a monolithic architecture to microservices is more than just a technical change for organizations. “If you require microservices, it’s not only about the architectural design patterns that you have to implement, or all the technical aspects of microservices, it’s also a cultural change.” Instead of everyone working together on one thing, you’ll have teams working on separate pieces. They’ll need to communicate differently. “It's going to be a huge cultural impact for the company if your team is not used to working in that direction. And I've seen multiple companies fail, not because the technical aspect was not there, but because the company didn't have the culture to adopt that kind of methodology.”

Moving into MicroProfile

Eclipse MicroProfile is a collaboration of several open source projects, like Red Hat, which aims for more effective delivery of microservices to enterprise Java applications. Emily Jiang defines MicroProfile as the established programming model for microservices and cloud native applications, which includes APIs to achieve quality services for your application. She adds, “That's why MicroProfile is a great framework for doing microservices, because they can manage the quality services for you.”

Learn best practices and get started with Eclipse MicroProfile on Platform.sh

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What’s new with Typescript 4.0 

Typescript is an Object-oriented, open source, scripting language, with static typing. With our guests, we discuss several exciting updates that come with the release of Typescript 4.0 , such as short-circuiting assignment operators, labeled tuple elements, and more. You can also follow along with this helpful slideshow about the release.

Variadic tuple types

Variadic tuple types are of value when you don’t know the ordering of an array. Our guest Stefan Adolf, Developer Ambassador, says, “Variadic tuple types allow you to say the first three elements are of type string, and the last three elements will be of type number.” He explains further, “These little arrest operators allow you to spread arrays, so you can de-structure arrays or classes by using these three little dots. You can put them as type pins in parameters and return values. So you can be very sure that what you are hinting towards is actually typed the way you declared it.”

Class property type inference from constructors

Normally, when you’ve got properties of a class, such as length, width, and area, you would give those types. But in TypeScript 4.0, this new inference feature allows you to skip giving properties a type, and it will infer the type by whatever you say the constructor is supposed to take. 

According to Stefan and Sarah, this feature can help developers save time and improve readability. Sarah Dayan, a Software Engineer at Algolia, explains further, “Type inference is very important, especially in TypeScript. You don’t actually want to clutter your JavaScript code with types, you want to infer as much as possible. The goal is not for you to define a type for everything, but to type what cannot be guessed by the program, and then let the logic of TypeScript decide, ‘Okay, you have a violation here or there.’ So inference is actually really interesting, because TypeScript is supposed to take the minimal amount of typing, and be smarter than you. Not having to repeat types makes a lot of sense.”

Try Next.js on Platform.sh today

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Open Social is a Drupal distribution and online community platform. We speak with the founders, Taco Potze and Bram ten Hove, in our episode today about how Open Social was born out of the idea to productize community building. 

Open Social origin story

Taco and Bram started Open Social after 14 years of Drupal agency experience. Taco says, “We stumbled upon this amazing use case of building a SaaS platform around social communities where we quickly host, maintain, and deploy your installations.”

Features focused on community

Open Social’s feature set is centered around community tools. Bram says out-of-the-box, Open Social gives users the ability to:

• Maintain a detailed user profile

What sets Open Social apart

The idea of Drupal distributions is not new. Taco gives several reasons Open Social is different from other distros: “I think with Open Social, you get 80% of what you need, you only need to do the 20% yourself. So out of the box, it's just a super stable framework. We use the distribution very much for our own internal social internet. It has events and groups and the stream and progressive web app in core. So it's out-of-the-box, just a usable product that you can fine tune to your specific needs.”

The (funded) future of Open Social

Open Social raised 1.2 million Euros recently from investors keenly interested in Open Social’s success. Bram says they have a plan set in place for the capital. “We'll be using some of the funds we raised to really enhance that experience for site managers and content managers, to use Open Social out-of-the-box without having to read a manual.”

In addition, Bram and Taco’s vision for the future is to give back to the Drupal community. Taco explains further, “So our focus is really on how we can build sustainable open source projects that are giving back to the community. And how we can build a model around that where we can actually maintain a healthy situation, attract good investors, hire great developers, and build a good product in the end. And I think we're finding that model.”

Use Open Social on Platform.sh to build your community 

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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.

The benefits of Jamstack

In this episode, we speak with Cassidy Williams and Jason Lengstorf, both on the Developer Experience Team at Netlify, about deploying Jamstack (which stands for Javascript, APIs, and Markup) applications to Netlify. 

Jason clarifies the Jamstack, “It’s honestly not a stack at all, so it ends up being a silly name for an architecture. Jamstack is a way of organizing your code. The Jamstack architecture is where you're abstracting your front end to being a layer of static assets that can be deployed to a CDN.”

Netlify helps host and maintain Jamstack applications

Cassidy explains how Netlify and Jamstack work together to maximize productivity, “The short way of saying what Netlify does is we host Jamstack applications. But the longer form is not only do we host them, but we also have a ton of different features that make it easy for the developer to maintain Jamstack applications.”

These features include:

• Form management — Add a Netlify attribute to an HTML form, and it will automatically gather all of your responses for you
• Split testing — Point different branches (whether production, staging, or QA) at different groups of users to test and compare the results
• Deploy previews — See what your deployment is going to look like on any given pull request before pushing it live
• Snippet injection — Inject different snippets of code into your applications without having to include it in the code itself

Netlify can also connect with GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket repositories, increasing your productivity further. Jason adds,“You want to switch as few contexts as you can when you're trying to get things done. When you’re working in GitHub, you can push up changes and Netlify will show them to you in deploy preview. All the context you need is right there. You don't have to go to other places to do other parts of your job, you can consolidate that whole workflow.”

You can try out Next.js on Platform.sh today by clicking the Deploy on Platform.sh button in our template's README: https://github.com/platformsh-templat…

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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.