Deploy Friday

The pandemic has accelerated the use of e-learning 

With the world moving suddenly-online, training and education has had to change and adapt rapidly. Today we discuss what qualifies as e-learning, its benefits, and other tools and strategies new e-learners can employ with two experts in the field, Olivia Lidde, Technical Curriculum Developer at AWS, and James Aparaicio, a Developer with Opigno.

The benefits of e-learning

While the pandemic may have pushed us all into understanding the intricacies of e-learning whether we like it or not, it also has its benefits. The three top reasons Olivia says companies want to embrace e-learning are: 

• Improve consistency across training offerings

And speaking of new technologies…

Opigno: offering comprehensive support for learners and teachers alike

Opigno, a learning management system (LMS) based on the open source Drupal content management system (CMS), can be great for organizations or for individual learners. It comes with:

• Learning paths that can be customized to learner’s interests to keep them engaged 

Opigno differentiators

When asked why people should use Opigno in particular, James responds, “I think people should be looking at Opigno because, first of all, it’s a great product. And it’s open source, so there are no license fees involved, so even if you are a one-person company, or a big company, or a big or small school, there are no license fees involved. It’s based on Drupal, so there’s a huge community behind it for modules, so it’s very easy to extend. And because of all that, I think it’s a very good solution.”

Try Opigno LMS on Platform.sh.

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Watch, listen, and 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 and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

Use Platform.sh’s extensibility to your advantage

Platform.sh is a highly extensible platform for managing your development workflow. As Larry Garfield, Director of Developer Experience, says, “We try to make Platform.sh an extensible system because we want to enable others to come up with better ideas than we have.”

As a part of that, many Platform.sh customers have built their own custom tooling on top of Platform.sh. Serhey Dolgushev, lead developer at Contextual Code, says they decided to move all their projects to Platform.sh. But he found out doing it manually was, as he terms it, “a nightmare”, so he wrote a script to help. In fact, we found Serhey’s migration script so useful, we put it in our official documentation and encourage all our customers to use it.

Matthias Bolt Lesniak, a TYPO3 consultant with Pixelant, used Platform.sh’s extensibility to build a Log Analyzer tool for PHP projects. This tool, he says, helped Pixelant gain valuable visibility into exactly how they were using resources, by mapping memory usage, flagging issues with project health, and overall, “it’s helped us to see what is really necessary for a good end user experience on the website.”

What’s new and exciting for Platform.sh

In this episode we also speak to María de Antón, Product Manager at Platform.sh, who reveals a new and major feature, Activity Scripts. Activity Scripts are custom pieces of JavaScript code that are added to your Platform.sh project via a single API call or CLI command. They allow your projects to do things like:

• Interact with third-party services 

Platform.sh’s future plans

When Maria asks which feature request they would want brought to life, Matthias says, “a reverse proxy cache would be so cool.” Serhey wants to be able to precisely specify the amount of resources per service, in addition to the predefined sizes like small, medium, large, that Platform.sh already offers. 

Check out the Activity Script documentation to find out how Platform.sh’s new feature can help you.

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Watch, listen, and 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 and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

What is Quarkus 

Quarkus is a cloud-native, (Linux) container-first framework for writing Java applications. It has become more popular lately due to its fast boot time, and low RSS memory, enabling your APIs to start more rapidly and consume smaller amounts of memory. 

The impetus for creating Quarkus

The game-changing benefits of Quarkus

• “Load, save, refresh” — Developers can make changes to the code and they don’t have to wait for the result.

The trade off

A focus on developer joy

Burr Sutter explains the creators’ guiding principle, “When we invented Quarkus, we knew out of the gate what we had to compete with, and we wanted to first create developer joy. That is our focus, our mission. Not to be a slave to any previous requirements from a previous generation. We’re living in this new cloud-native world.” 

Try Quarkus on Platform.sh, where we also contribute to your developer joy!

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Watch, listen, and 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 and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us. 

The principles of open source

Open source has redefined how we work since its genesis in the late 90s. One of our speakers defines open source as being like a “social network for developers”, where competition is replaced with collaboration. This emphasis on collaboration, as well as transparency and contribution, are key principles of open source. So how can adopting an open source mindset have a positive impact on your career, like it did for our speakers?   

An open source mindset can help your career in many ways

• Network to build your community: From Slack channels, issue queues, and conferences, open source provides a variety of opportunities for networking and community building. Whether asynchronous or real-time, you can choose which ways suit you best.

The impact of open source is far-reaching

Whether your company embraces it or not, open source has changed the way we do everything. Yara Senger notes this impact, saying, “I can see how open source has changed everything, especially the power we give to people. I think the soul of open source is one of the most important things we have had in the last twenty years.”

Try Drupal 9 on Platform.sh today.

Platform.sh on social media

Watch, listen, and 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 and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

TYPO3: From underdog to international CMS

TYPO3 is a free, open source CMS that’s been around for 23 years. Universities, airlines, banks, and cruise ships around the world use it and love it for its reliability, structure, and stability. Robert Douglass compares TYPO3’s success to a “David and Goliath story, where the scrappy open source project came along and overthrew proprietary software.”

TYPO3’s unique multisite and multilingual capabilities

TYPO3’s strong multisite and multilingual capabilities make it a popular choice for international companies who manage multiple brands. TYPO3 can support thousands of sites, users, and pages within a single install, all stored in one database. 

Luisa Faßbender, TYPO3 Marketing Team Lead, says, “These companies are all around the world, and they don’t want to have 20 different websites and backgrounds. TYPO3 enables us to create really easy, fast, and good-performing websites effortlessly.”

The 10.4.1 LTS release benefits developers, marketers, and users

TYPO3 already has features that help make developers’ and marketers’ jobs easier: like an easily navigable page-tree structure, easy extensibility, and a steady release cycle. The 10.4.1 release provides even more new and exciting features to explore.

For marketers and editors

• realURL included

For developers

• Core-wide dependency injection

For users

• Integrated dashboard

TYPO3 has challenges, but it’s built for the long run

TYPO3’s new release is more of the same -- and that’s a good thing

Over time, TYPO3 has built itself a dedicated community with its reliability, stability, and great multisite and multilingual support. The 10.4.1 LTS release keeps up TYPO3’s standards while improving the daily lives of your developers, marketers, and users.

Platform.sh

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Watch, listen, and 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 and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

Migrating Java applications to the cloud

Java is a popular framework that’s been a foundation for many enterprise applications for over 20 years. But lately, those enterprises have run into trouble: moving their applications to the cloud. This migration promises more security, reliability, and easier scaling, but it can be daunting with an older framework like Java. The host, Robert Douglass of Platform.sh, asks,

“With all these older versions of applications floating around in this huge plethora of runtimes and variants, does that make it harder for organizations to “lift and shift”, or to adopt cloud native philosophies?” 

Speakers from Red Hat, the Eclipse Foundation, and Paerra address the Java toolbox that can help ease this transition.

Java toolbox for developers

• Jlink -- A command-line utility which helps modularize your application and makes it possible to build your own JVM 

What should hype up developers about working with Jakarta EE? Ivar Grimstad of the Eclipse Foundation says, “If you want to be future-proof and to be productive right away, you can write less code, less configuration, and less boilerplate to get up and running using Jakarta EE than any other framework.”

Make your life easier with Java tools

Launching Java-built applications to the cloud can be difficult, but developers can minimize bumps by putting tools like Jlink, Graal.vm, Transformer, and Jakarta EE to work. Robert Douglass sums it up: “Stability, backwards compatibility, safety, and boringness are the hallmarks of the Java ecosystem these days, and they are really attractive features when the very act of software development is so fraught with risk.”

Launch Java applications from these Platform.sh templates today.

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Harness the power of Gatsby with your headless CMS

The monolithic approach to content management, where you have two parts, the backend and the frontend, has been shifting. Now the “headless” CMS paradigm, where the frontend and the backend are separated, and an API replaces the frontend, is front-and-center. Pierre Burgy, co-founder & CEO of Strapi defines headless as a “CMS without a frontend.”

Adding Gatsby to the headless mix changes the direction of web development

Adding these benefits to Gatsby, a static site generator, is a powerful combination. Through source plug-ins, Gatsby decouples application resources from headless CMS options like Strapi, Drupal, and Oracle, providing benefits for developers, marketers, and end users like:

• Faster performance -- By automating code-splitting, lazy-loading, and prefetching resources, the end result is that Gatsby is fast, which makes for a huge difference in the end user experience. Dustin Schau, Head of Product at Gatsby, says, “The idea is to source content at build time, let servers do the hard work, and don’t offload that cost to the end user.” 

The combination of headless and Gatsby can take your site in a whole new direction

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Watch, listen, and 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 and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

Our work lives have changed

During this episode, Robert Douglass goes live with the founders of Mattermost, Nextcloud, and Platform.sh to discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the way we live and work. 

There is no question that our work lives have been upended dramatically. With children staying home, there are new demands on our time. Most of us no longer commute to the office, and are carving out a place to work in our own homes, where space can be limited. Many of us are also struggling with the lack of social connection the office used to bring. On top of this, there is an ever-present layer of stress from simply living through a pandemic.

How tech companies handle remote work challenges

We have much to learn from tech companies, especially those who are already remote, on the most effective way to adapt to these changes.

• Choose your tools wisely -- Frank Karlitschek, the CEO and Founder of Nextcloud, says they have felt better prepared for the pandemic as a remote-first company, and they know what tools are most effective for them. Says Frank, “We use tools that let people work from where and how they want,” like Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Mattermost.

What the future of work may hold

The shift toward remote work has steadily been on the upswing, but COVID-19 has massively accelerated the arc. Around the world, companies are suddenly questioning the status quo and whether they truly need big headquarters and long commutes. But all three CEOs agree this willingness to question and be flexible is a huge positive that has come out of such troubled times.

Try Mattermost and Nextcloud today on Platform.sh.

Platform.sh on social media

Watch, listen, and 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 and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.