Building Robust Platform Using Open Source

Open source has become the de-facto norm for software development and has shown to be a sustainable business model since its beginning in 1998. Huber constructed a solid platform entirely out of open source components, and we are strong advocates of open source technologies. While it may seem paradoxical to make source code publicly available for redistribution and modification, firms like Google, Red Hat, and Canonical ( publisher of Ubuntu) have proven that an open-source approach can be profitable.

Investment from international business organizations such as Google, Facebook, and Adobe demonstrates open source’s expanding value and long-term viability. It should come as no surprise that fast-paced innovation in the form of collaboration and information sharing is at the heart of open source.

@Huber Platform

Huber platform has two user interfaces. The web interface was created using AngularJS and Node, while the mobile interface was created using React Native. NodeJS was chosen because it is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment that runs on the V8 engine and executes JavaScript code outside of a web browser.

HTML is great for describing static documents, but when it comes to declaring dynamic views in web applications, it falls short. AngularJS allows you to expand your corporate platform’s HTML vocabulary. The outcome is a very expressive, readable, and quick-to-create environment. As a result, we decided to use AngularJS for our Huber platform. It’s completely customizable and integrates well with other libraries. Every feature can be changed or removed to meet a company’s own development workflow and feature requirements.

We didn’t want to go with the other options because they either abstract away HTML, CSS, and/or JavaScript or provide an imperative means to manipulate the DOM. Neither of these solutions addresses the underlying issue that HTML was not meant to support dynamic views.

Mobile Interface

Native apps for Android and iOS were created using the React framework. React Native combines the greatest features of native development with React, a top-of-the-line JavaScript toolkit for creating user interfaces. Use a little — or a lot. You can use React Native now in your existing Android and iOS applications or you can construct a totally new app from scratch. Create platform-specific versions of components so that code from one codebase can be shared across other platforms. React Native allows a single team to manage two platforms while sharing a common technology — React.

Seamless Cross-Platform — React components use React’s declarative UI paradigm and JavaScript to wrap existing native code and interface with native APIs. This opens up native app development to entirely new teams of developers, as well as allowing existing native teams to work considerably more quickly.

Admin Console

We used the backend PHP Laravel framework, which is an excellent and proven framework, to administrate the user or member portals. It is a free, open-source PHP web framework designed by Taylor Otwell and based on Symfony. It is meant for the creation of online applications that follow the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural paradigm. Laravel has a modular packaging system with dedicated dependency management, many ways to access relational databases, utilities to help with application deployment and maintenance, and a syntactic sugar perspective.

We used MySQL community edition and deployed our application on Amazon RDS, which makes it simple to set up, maintain, and grow MySQL deployments in the cloud. You may deploy scalable MySQL servers in minutes with cost-effective and resizable hardware capacity with Amazon RDS. By handling time-consuming database administration activities such as backups, software patching, monitoring, scaling, and replication, Amazon RDS for MySQL allows you to focus on application development.

Messaging and Communication

Google’s Firebase technology allows developers to create mobile and online applications. It started off as a stand-alone business in 2011. Google acquired the platform in 2014, and it is now their main option for app creation. The Firebase Realtime Database, an API that synchronizes application data across iOS, Android, and Web devices and saves it in Firebase’s cloud, was Firebase’s initial offering. For real-time messaging in Android and iOS apps, we used Firebase.

Huber supports open source technology and recommends them to the entrepreneurial community. The open-source stack is used to build a large component of our Huber platform. We will explore more open source products and cognitive frameworks to build and integrate with the Huber platform in subsequent phases of platform development.

Conclusion

The world would be an extremely different place without these tools and platforms. While several of these technologies have closed source counterparts, the environment would be totally different if open-source software did not exist. The world around us has been drastically impacted by open source technology; practically everything would be different if it weren’t for it. There would be no search engines, and the internet’s functionality would be drastically different.

Originally published at https://medium.com on October 5, 2021.