Web

May 08 2023

InRhythm Presents The Propel Spring Quarterly Summit

Design Credit: Joel Colletti, Lead UI/UX Designer @ InRhythm

New York, NY – InRhythm recently concluded its very first Propel Spring Quarterly Summit; a premiere event consisting of six individual coding workshops aimed to support the learning and growth of engineering teams around the world.

Over the last three weeks, our consulting practices have led a series of interactive experiences that delved into the latest technology trends and tools, designed to propel professionals forward into their careers.

The workshops are free to access as a unique part of InRhythm’s mission to build a forward-thinking thought leadership annex:

SDET Workshop (03/17/23)

This workshop worked as an introduction to writing and running tests using Microsoft Playwright. Our SDET Practice went over Playwright’s extensive feature set before diving more in-depth with its API.

For the workshop, the team went over setup and installation of the tool, as well as wrote a series of comprehensive tests against a test application. Once tests were run, the team afforded participants the opportunity to go over some of Playwright’s advanced features, such as its powerful debugger and enhanced reporting.

To close out the workshop, SDET Practice Leadership compared Playwright’s features to some of its competitors, went over its pros and cons, and discussed why they believed it to be a paramount tool to consider for automated testing solutions.

Web Workshop (03/24/23)

Our Web Practice focused their workshop on their top three, intertwining technologies for development cycles.

With many modern web applications sharing many of the responsibilities that a middle layer/presentation and service layer/backend provide to the frontend layer, the project was kicked off by organizing the elements with a mono-repository.

Once the application moved into its build phase, it was time to accelerate the architecture to the next level using NextJS.

Web Practice Leadership wrapped their project, with an intuitive overview of web bundling and the variety of methods utilized – in order to best adapt to each individual build.

DevOps Workshop (03/29/23)

In this workshop, the DevOps Practice demonstrated tools for provisioning infrastructure as well as how to construct a self-servicing platform for provisioning resources. With these new developments in the industry, bridging the gaps between development and ops by allowing developers to self-manage cloud infrastructure to satisfy their needs will be a paramount skill to adopt. Our DevOps practitioners discussed the pros and cons of a number of tools for provisioning infrastructure and identified which tools can best fit a business’ needs.

For the hands-on interactive session, the team ran through the necessary steps to get started with Pulumi and provision a resource onto AWS, along with demonstrating Terraform in order to get a feel for the difference between the two popular infrastructure-as-code tools. After that, we set up some plugins to enhance the development experience with IaC.

Self-servicing platforms are the best way to allow for engineers to provision resources and infrastructure for their needs en-masse. With Backstage, the team was able to demonstrate a platform for engineers to come to and fulfill their needs whether it be creating a new microservice, a new repository, or even provisioning a new k8s cluster. Furthermore, the provisioning of these resources were proven to standardize and bring uniformity to ensure that best practices are enforced. Long gone are the days of submitting a ticket to create a new instance to deploy an application, with a wait time of a few hours or even a few days. Self-servicing tools are the future of bringing operations into the hands of developers and bridging the gap between development and operations.

Finally, DevOps Practice Leadership set up a self-servicing platform and hooked it into the aforementioned IaC repository to allow for the provisioning of resources from a GUI.

Managing infrastructure can quickly become tedious as the number of resources being used on a cloud provider continue to grow. With infrastructure-as-code, not only DevOps engineers, but developers can now lay out infrastructure using code. Since it’s managed via code, version-controlling/source-code management tools are also available, making management of infrastructure significantly easier.

iOS Workshop (03/28/23)

Our iOS Practice did a full overview of Swift Async/Await for iOS application development

Async/Await is a programming feature that simplifies asynchronous operations by allowing software engineers to write asynchronous code in a synchronous manner. It also makes code easy to read/write, improves performance/responsiveness, and reduces the likelihood of errors.

In short, Async/Await is a powerful modern feature in every avenue from development speed and simplified code to and application performance.

Android Workshop (04/11/23)

Our Android Practice performed a comprehensive demonstration of the practical integration of Kotlin Multi-Platform Mobile (KMM) for cross-platform development.

Kotlin Multi-Platform Mobile is an exciting, growing new technology that allows sharing core code between Android, iOS, and Web.

In this workshop, Android Practice Leadership explored what KMM was, how to setup a project for KMM, a walkthrough implementing a core module to a few APIs (network layer, data models, parsers, and business logic), and then consumed this core library in an Android (Jetpack Compose) and iOS (SwiftUI) application.

Cloud Native Application Development Workshop (04/21/23)

In this workshop our Cloud Native Application Development Practice introduced the participants to gRPC, which is Google’s take on Remote Procedural Calls. Our Practice Leadership presented a brief history of gRPC and Protocol Buffers. Google and other companies use gRPC to serialize data to binary which results in smaller data packets. Throughout the presentation our team went over some of the pros and cons of using gRPC for individual API calls.

In our hands-on workshop portion participants created a simple application to manage users and notes powered by Java, gRPC, and Postgres. The grand finale featured a full-circle moment as we worked together to create a series of CRUD APIs in Java using gRPC to send/receive data packets, translate those into objects, and store them in a database.

About InRhythm

InRhythm is a leading modern product consultancy and digital innovation firm with a mission to make a dent in the digital economy. Founded in 2002, InRhythm is currently engaged by Fortune 50 enterprises and scale-ups to bring their next generation of modern digital products and platforms to market. InRhythm has helped hundreds of teams launch mission-critical products that have created a positive impact worth billions of dollars. The projects we work on literally change the world.

InRhythm’s unique capabilities of Product Innovation and Platform Modernization services are the most sought-after. The InRhythm team of A+ thought leaders don’t just “get a job,” they join the company to do what they love. InRhythm has a “who’s who” clients list and has barely scratched the surface in terms of providing those clients the digital solutions they need to compete. From greenfield to tier-one builds, our clients look to us to deliver their mission-critical projects in the fields of product strategy, design, cloud native applications, as well as mobile and web development.

Apr 12 2023

What You Can Expect From React 18

Based on a Lightning Talk by: Godfrey Best, Senior Software Engineer @ InRhythm on March 29th, 2023 as part of the Propel Spring Quarterly Summit 2023

Author: Paris Leach, Senior Software Engineer @ InRhythm

Overview

Recently we had an exciting Lightning Talk led by Godfrey Best, who walked us through the changes introduced by React 18.

React 18 ushers in structural changes to the library that will help developers create more performant applications. Among these changes are the highly anticipated concept of concurrent rendering, which gives the developer fine-grain control over how their components render. We will discuss these changes at a (mostly) high level, in the hopes that you walk away from this article with a solid understanding of the changes that this version introduces.

What Is React?

Before we dive into React 18, we’re going to take a brief look at what React is for those who are not familiar. Feel free to skip this section if you already have a good grasp of React.

React is, succinctly, a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It was created at Meta in 2011 (many of you will remember that it was called Facebook, at the time) and open sourced in 2013. It swiftly became the most popular frontend library/framework.

It provides a declarative, component-based API so that you don’t need to worry about page changes on every update. You pass data to the components, and React determines how they should render. React renders a Virtual DOM (not to be confused with the Shadow DOM), listens for changes in component data, and by default re-renders only those components whose data has changed.

React data is generally passed unilaterally (from parent to child, and not vice-versa), and is usually either a component property (data that is passed from a parent to a child) or a part of component state (internal data that belongs to a specific component and can only be directly changed by that same component).

For most of React’s lifespan, it has relied on synchronous rendering, which means that once an application has begun rendering, the user must wait for the render to be completed before they can interact with the components (these render methods and their callbacks are pushed to JavaScript’s single-threaded call stack).

About Version 18

React 18 was released on March 29th, 2022, and among other changes, it adds features that allow the developer to switch from synchronous rendering to asynchronous rendering, or as React has coined it, concurrent features. This allows React to render and re-render its components outside of the call stack, unblocking the user’s opportunity to interact while the render process occurs. In addition, the developer can establish priority for certain renders, giving them more granular control over their applications. React concurrent features:

are opt-in (when upgrading to React 18, components are not automatically set to render concurrently)
are backwards compatible
employ reusable state
are interruptible

How Can We Use These New Features?

There are a number of new hooks introduced in React 18, most which are expected to be implemented by framework authors, such as Next.js, Hydrogen and Remix. A few of the new hooks made available are:

useId
- Used for generating unique ids on both the client and server to prevent hydration mismatches
useInsertionEffect
- Allows for CSS and JavaScript libraries to address performance issues while they are injecting styles during rendering
useSyncExternalStore
- Allows external stores to support concurrent reads by forcing updates to the stores to be synchronous (useful for state management libraries like Redux)
useTransition
- Allows the library’s authors to mark certain actions as low priority (such as switching between pages) *We’ll be taking a closer look at this hook later in the article

React 18 also splits the rendering API (ReactDOM) into 2 parts:

ReactDOM/client
ReactDOM/server

What Features Can We Use Today?

Not all of these features require time for frameworks (or us) to implement; some of them can be used today, out-of-box:

Automatic Batching

Before React 18, if you had multiple state updates that were called inside of a React event handler function, they would be batched automatically, and the component would only be re-rendered once. This formerly only applied to React state handlers, and not, for example, setTimeouts or native event handlers. React 18 changes this by automatically batching all state updates inside any function by default. This reduces unnecessary re-renders.

useDeferredValue()

This tells React to only render a value when it’s convenient, similar to debounce, though this feature has superior performance to the former. Unlike debounce, there is no fixed time delay before this fires; additionally, this can be interrupted and does not block user input.

useTransition()

This hook is similar to useDeferredValue(), except that it tells React to render a state update when it’s convenient. It can also show if a transition is pending, which is a useful status to have awareness of within your application.

Suspense For Data Fetching

This feature actually existed in previous versions of React, but it was only used for code splitting. In React 18, suspense is available for data fetching, allowing for a declarative fallback ui in scenarios when the application is waiting on an asynchronous action to complete.

Conclusion

React 18 brings some long awaited performance boons and quality-of-life improvements. The move away from synchronous to concurrent rendering is something React has been working on since 2017 and now developers can finally avail themselves of its benefits. React also has some future developments in the pipeline:

Rendering components offscreen, allowing a developer to prepare ui to render in advance of the ui being on the page
Improvements around suspense for data fetching, such as more exposed primitives to make it easier to access your data, as well as the ability to use the feature without a framework having to implement it
Server components (an experimental but upcoming feature), allowing developers to build apps spanning both the client and the server

Mar 24 2023

InRhythm Spring Quarterly Summit: Web Workshop

This quarter we’ll be focusing on 3 great technologies that go hand in hand in hand. These days our web applications share many of the responsibilities that our middle layer/presentation service layer/backend for frontend layer does that it makes sense to organize the project with a mono-repository.

Creating react apps with create-react-app has been the tried and true way to build but take your apps to the next level with NextJS. And finally learn about web bundling and find out which one works best for you.

Web