Technology Report 2012

Transcription

1 DiVERSE. DiLIGENT. DiFFERENT Technology Report

2 Pg. 2 Pg. 3 All facts, no fiction As a technology company that builds transactional web and mobile applications, and software and devices for the Internet of Things, we make data-driven decisions about the areas on which we should be concentrating. We use a framework for making those evidencebased decisions internally, and from the feedback we received from our customers we are confident you would find a selection of that data useful too. The DiUS Technology Report differs from others in that it is based on empirical data rather than relying solely on our opinion. It brings together, into a single view, data obtained by measuring the hours we expend and what our customers and staff think. The report contains observations of measurements of how our work profile has changed over the last 4 years of the 7 years DiUS has operated. It also contains highlights of feedback from surveys we conducted of our customers and our staff. We present an up-to-the-minute view of our technology stack recipes combinations of components we have proven to work well together that we have developed and carefully refined on real-world projects we have delivered for our customers. We use and constantly update these recipes for our projects; we offer them in the Technology Report in the hope they can help you get a head start on your next Rails, Grails, or Java project. The Technology Report summarises the effort of our staff in Melbourne and Sydney. My thanks to the DiUS founders Joe Losinno and Clency Coutet for their support, to Mick Reidy and Ricky Yim, our Delivery Managers, for their input and advice, to our Engagement Principals Paula Ngov and Alistair McGregor for their help with the customer survey, and to Jerome Lebel-Jones for his valued creative input. Our recipes for success Rails Rails is increasing in popularity among developers and customers for its productivity benefits, maturing test frameworks, and vibrant ecosystem of gems and community support. Although in the past it was sometimes found to be lacking in performance and ability to horizontally scale, the Rails community has been busy making better performance a priority, to the point now where customers can confidently use Rails for their highest traffic applications. Grails Grails is gaining in popularity for customers who want the productivity benefits of Rails but who want to continue to deploy on their JVM infrastructure. Grails is also attractive for organisations who have a Java application heritage and want to leverage Java libraries and services. Backbone/Spine, Devise/Sorcery Chief Technology Officer Daryl is the CTO at DiUS, where he is responsible for executing DiUS s technology strategy: to expertly apply the latest innovations in technologies that increase developer productivity and help focus on delivering user-centered and more scalable enterprise-grade software applications and devices for customers. EngineYard/Heroku Solr, Tire/Elastic foreman to start the processes defined in the profile PaperTrail CanCan Resque Resque Scheduler MemCache Airbrake, Stethoscope, Nagios PostgreSQL cane, rcov (1.8.7), simplecov (1.9.x), roodi, reek, flog and flay. Metrics_fu for a consolidated report but not good for check-in builds. Active Apache httpd (+mod_proxy) ActiveRecord Cucumber, rspec, jasmine + jasmine_headless_webkit for javascript unit testing MongoDB Apache Tomcat EC2 Solr, Elastic Envers Tomcat startup Quartz Ehcache & Spring Cache Quartz Scheduler GORM (Hibernate) Scaffolding Ehcache & Spring Cache Hibernate (any jdbc-driven db) JUnit, cumber-jvm, geb, selenium Cobertura, GMetrics, CodeNarc NewRelic Apache httpd (+mod_proxy) (any jdbc-driven db) Java continues to be a requirement for many organisations who have established infrastructure and support processes based on the JVM, who have in-house skills in the Java language, and who want to leverage their collections of Java libraries built up over a number of years. Java Rails 3.1, Ruby Mongoid, MongoDB By publishing this report, we have set out to add to your set of useful points of reference for technology choices. However, applying the principle of measuring value and avoiding assumptions, please send your feedback directly to me at dwm@dius.com.au. Daryl Wilding-McBride nginx, Unicorn MongoDB Apache Tomcat EC2 Solr, Elastic Envers Tomcat startup Quartz JUnit, selenium Quartz Scheduler Cobertura, CodeNarc Custom NewRelic

3 Jan 2008 May 2008 Sep 2008 Jan 2009 May 2009 Sep 2009 Jan 2010 May 2010 Sep 2010 Jan 2011 May 2011 Sep 2011 Jan 2012 System Technology Monthly hours of effort in Rails first overtook Java in May % 1% 80% DiUS delivers its first native app for the iphone within 6 months of the Apple App Store opening Rails: 19% Other: 1% Java: 80% 1461 Days of DiUS DiUS mainly uses only two core technologies to deliver applications 14,000+ Hours spent to date on Embedded C/C++ since November 09. November 09 DiUS initiates its first hardware development project. HTML5: 2% Embedded C/C++: 11% Groovy/Grails: 6% Ruby/Rails: 43% Java: 36% Objective-C: 2% 6% 2% 11% 43% 2% 36% The total amount of hours spent on hardware development since November 2009, now a significant part of DiUS s work. In November 2011 DiUS delivers its first crossplatform native app on iphone using Titanium DiUS expands its repertoire to a total of 12 technologies 24,889 of all DiUS effort in January 2008 is for transactional web apps DiUS s focus has truly shifted into multi- channel/emdebbed delivery systems in addition to traditional web apps. the overall effort for non-web app work during January 2012 was 85% 31% In November 09 DiUS was the first Australian company to work for the electric car industry producing charging technology. Agile comes of age: in March 2011 DiUS brings Agile methodology into the highly regulated and process-driven medical field. Domain 44% of our business came from the advertising/media domain in 2008 only 5% of our effort is spent in the advertising/media domain, making us a more diverse company than previously. 5% Jan 2008 May 2008 Sep 2008 Jan 2009 May 2009 Sep 2009 Jan 2010 May 2010 Sep 2010 Jan 2011 May 2011 Sep 2011 Jan 2012

4 Pg. 6 Pg. 7 Customer Insights Employee Insights A key input into our decisions about technology direction is what our customers think. Rather than make assumptions, we asked them about their main concerns, and their thoughts on technology choices in the near- and medium-term. The respondents were from the full range of business domains in which DiUS operates. The most-represented role was Senior or Group Manager (28%), but we also had Program Managers (15%), Team Leads (10%), Architects (8%), CEOs (8%), CTOs (10%), and Delivery Managers (13%). A reliable indication of what will become mainstream in the future is what our staff are investigating out of their curiosity and their drive to improve what they do. We surveyed our staff to get another key input into our decision-making about technology direction. Of the respondents, 65% were software engineers or developers, 9% were business analysts, 13% were team leads, and 7% were architects. Percentage of work by domain 2008 Over the coming 12 months, our clients will focus on... At DiUS we believe it s no use having great ideas or being creative if there s no focus on shipping. Our customers are also attuned to this in their responses: Reducing time-to-market for new products and/or services (much interest = 72%). This increases to a whopping 80% beyond the next 12 months. Removing deployment bottlenecks with frictionless/continuous delivery (much interest = 69%) Reducing waste with Lean software development (much interest = 73%) The value of UX is being recognised more broadly, with 73% of respondents expressing much interest in focussing on user-centred design An issue very close to our hearts, initiating and maintaining your innovation culture had the highest interest level of the entire survey with 100% of respondents expressing either some or much interest and 3 out of 4 respondents rating it of much interest. Percentage of work by domain 2012 DiUS staff strongly favour convention-over-configuration frameworks like Rails and Grails for their productivity. However, 54% said they would like us to do more Rails, and 48% said more Grails. In contrast, 52% of respondents said we are doing about the right amount of Java. Most staff thought we are doing about the right proportion of web apps, consulting assignments, infrastructure, and building shared services. However, a big majority would like to do more mobile apps (80%). Utilities 20% Utilities - 30% 80% said they would like to do more mobile apps 6% Somewhat surprisingly... The somewhat lower-than-expected overall result for improving stakeholder engagement. This might mean most customers already have it sorted, though surely it can always be improved? There was a fairly split feeling about Agile architecture, with roughly the same number of respondents having much interest as do those with no interest. Whilst Agile delivery has come of age, the time is yet to come for Agile architecture. Weaker interest than expected in cloud infrastructure. The most likely reason for this is that Australian organisations are still keeping their infrastructure in-house due to concerns about data jurisdiction. 54% would like us to do more Rails Advertising/Media 44% Web application frameworks Rails (Ruby) and Spring (Java) hold more interest than Grails, Roo, or Play. Roo and Play are still (b)leading edge and not production-ready, so those results are not a surprising outcome for the next 12 months. Grails, however, has been used by DiUS to deliver a few reasonably large apps in complex domains and we believe it is production-ready, so the strength of the no interest response was a little surprising. Building apps for mobile devices Respondents expressed a strong interest in native apps and web apps for mobile devices, but there was less interest in cross-platform frameworks. This is consistent with DiUS s conclusion; we feel we get more control over the user experience by using the native language of the platform. We recently delivered the Taylor ios app using Titanium and then invested a few days of internal innovation resource to estimate the effort to create an Android version starting with the same code-base. To create a functionally-equivalent Android version, we estimated it would take another 40% of the effort taken to build the ios version. Respondents, however, feel this will change over the medium term, with cross-platform becoming of interest beyond the next 12 months. This probably reflects a belief the maturity of these frameworks will improve in that timeframe. 9% Advertising/Media 5% Retail 2% Electric Vehicles 5% Travel 1% Banking 2% Education 6% 52% said we are doing about the right amount of Java 48% would like us to do more Grails Our objective is to hire people who are always looking on the horizon for better ways of doing things and adopting them. This attribute is reflected in the broad range of answers to the question about what technologies or knowledge areas we should be learning about even more deeply: Retail 2% Software Tools Development 1% Logistics 9% Functional programming UX, design thinking Highly-available NoSQL Social 8% CoffeeScript Insurance 2% NoSQL data stores It was surprising that there was not stronger interest in NoSQL databases in the short term, given their strengths in scalability, availability, and flexibility. This is probably because respondents business objectives are being adequately met with traditional RDBMSs, and their corresponding operational and support structures are in place and satisfactory. However, respondents feel the importance of NoSQL data stores will increase beyond the next 12 months. Post-Java languages on the JVM, especially Scala Banking 8% Logistics 1% Software Tools Development 9% Medical 30% Amazon Web Services

5 DiVERSE. DiLIGENT. DiFFERENT Top 10 technology tips for the next 12 months 1 For their ability to help developers deliver features more quickly and with more agility, convention-overconfiguration application frameworks such as Rails and Grails will continue to reduce Java s past dominance of the web application development scene. We expect Rails and Grails to increase their share of our work and further eclipse the Java share over the next 12 months Grails will increasingly find a place in the technology stacks of customers who don t want to move away from the JVM. New Java-based convention-over-configuration frameworks such as Play will become production-ready. While in the past developers who only have mastery of Java would be in demand, today and into the future it will be critical for a developer to have mastery of two or three languages. We expect those to be drawn from Ruby, Objective-C, Groovy, JavaScript, and Java. We expect functional programming languages such as Scala to begin to play a part for specific problem domains. 5 The use of NoSQL databases, especially MongoDB, will increase as customers are attracted to their light-weight approach to horizontal scalability and high availability compared with traditional RDBMSs such as Oracle, MySQL and Postgres. 6 Rather than making assumptions about what users want, customers will more and more use analytics to test assumptions, and only add a feature that has been proven to contribute to growth metrics. Daily, or at least weekly, releases to production will enable this agility through automated continuous deployment with Chef or Puppet. The agility of cloud infrastructure (public and private) will also enable this trend. 7 People with deep skills and experience in UX and usercentred design will be an important part of every project. With this growth in demand, project stakeholders will need to be more vigilant about the actual depth of UX expertise in their organisations, to avoid unintentionally labelling poor experience design with user-centred design. 8 Native mobile apps in Objective-C for ios and Java for Android will continue to be more important than crossplatform frameworks such as Titanium and PhoneGap, or web apps using HTML5. The main driver behind this importance of native apps is the much greater control over the user experience on both platforms. We have also found that the promise of crossplatform is not real; an app written with Titanium on ios will take about another 30-40% of the effort again to port to one device running Android. 9 ios will continue to be more important than Android in Australia for mobile applications, due to ios s user mindshare and severe platform fragmentation of the Android platform. 10 Analytics will become more important to glean understanding and make predictions from raw data, especially in the analysis of sentiment about products, effectiveness of customer interactions, and consumer and business confidence. Melbourne Paula Ngov Engagement Principal pngov@dius.com.au P Level 10, 99 Queen Street Melbourne 3000 VIC Australia Sydney Alistair MacGregor Engagement Principal amacgregor@dius.com.au P Level 5, 220 George Street Sydney 2000 NSW Australia