Understanding Open Source Technology For Developing Better Web Projects

The term “open source” refers to any application whose source code is made publicly available for users or other developers to use or modify as they see appropriate.

In contrast to proprietary technology, open-source technology is computer technology produced as part of public, sincere cooperation and made freely available to the public.

What is the background of open source software?

Programmers would frequently share technology in the early years of technology development to learn from one another and advance the area of computer programming.

The Free Technology Foundation (FSF) was founded due to this, including David Knuth’s TeX typesetting program in 1979 and Richard Stallman’s GNU operating system in 1983. Indeed, the early web browser Netscape was an accessible Technology with source code that eventually went on to help establish open-source Technology projects such as Mozilla Firefox, which is still widely used today. The FSF was eventually superseded by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), a group of technology developers who produce technology that is free to share, enhance, and redistribute.

The open-source movement has its enemies, such as Microsoft’s Jim Allchin, who said in 2001 that the OSI was an “intellectual property destroyer.” Today, however, Microsoft and many other companies have jumped on board the free and open-source technology bandwagon. This has resulted in a significant change in how open source technology is perceived. The Linux Foundation, the WordPress Foundation, Creative Commons, the Android Open Source Project, and the Mozilla Foundation are some of the other open source project contributors, funders, and nonprofits.

The following are some of the reasons why open source technology is used in web development:

Management of open source identity access:

The necessity to create identity and access privileges is a critical component in moving to a decentralized Jamstack architecture. We may need authentication and authorization when using JavaScript to call for things in an API. As a result, we had to keep the identity provider distinct from any specific implementation. This is divided into two concepts: identity (author) and identity access management (author). The identity provider verifies your identification, while access management verifies your responsibilities and rights to perform specific tasks. Establishing an independent identity provider was one of the primary requirements when designing the event-management software.

OpenStack is an SSO solution that combines OpenID Connect and oAuth2. OpenStack began as a more secure way for users to log in and manage their accounts on OpenStack.org. Users will have a seamless authentication experience as the number of websites and event apps we handle expands. The access-management component allows us to create independent React-based apps that use the identity provider to evaluate if a user has the right to do what they want in that application.

Privacy is something that everyone thinks about, especially in a worldwide open source community. It plays a significant role in developing our digital and event properties. Users can utilize the OAuth 2 console to log into their OpenStackID account and establish application permissions. They can delete rights if they no longer want their app to be associated with their OpenStack.

Using open source to improve web infrastructure:

After considering our options and moving toward a more flexible CMS installation, our teams collaborated more successfully. Most importantly, we uphold our community principles by utilizing open source technologies to provide excellent privacy and security options.

Creating a web architecture that is CMS-agnostic:

We used to rely on an open-source CMS called SilverStripe to meet this need for flexibility. Our needs, however, quickly surpassed the system. To pull data into custom-designed presentation layers, we established a standalone API and used static microsites with React JavaScript components. Everything from mobile apps to website development to digital signs uses this framework. Jamstack architecture is the name given to this design. We discovered that this architecture was versatile enough to allow us to move our data wherever while being CMS-independent.

We discovered that our data was used in various places and presented in a variety of ways after implementing our API-driven approach. We share everything from pictures to dynamic information across our seven web properties. Without a lot of bespoke programming effort and either cron jobs or expensive database searches, a typical CMS won’t be able to do this. You can access all of these different datasets across various platforms when everything is API-driven, and your infrastructure is protected chiefly from severe traffic spikes.

Consider the following points when developing a website:

We must evaluate how we manage our software lifecycles while thinking about web development technology. Every software development project contains some form of lifecycle management, which allows you to plan, analyze, create, and implement code. Our web development team frequently collaborates with other departments and works on the fly. That implies our needs and workflow must be adaptable enough to accommodate rapid iterations, updates, and corrections. I’d instead get something out quickly and go back in later to make things pixel flawless if necessary.

Here are some of the most interesting open-source projects on the internet:

The fascinating new open source technology based projects never cease to amaze us; if you know where to search, there’s almost always a blazing open-source alternative to whatever pro software you need for your web design work.

Atom:

Atom is a popular text editor among programmers because it is hackable at its core. Users can customize it to meet their individual needs as an open-source project. You won’t have to code anything new if you want to add a new feature or update something because there are already hundreds of open source technology packages that other users have produced to provide new features. Look through them to discover valuable features you didn’t realize you needed.

Cassandra Apache:

Apache Cassandra is a globally distributed and decentralized database for managing enormous amounts of organized and unstructured data. It was created for inbox search on Facebook and released as open-source in July 2008. Cassandra’s elastic and linear scalability is one of its most important properties, as it allows for a consistent, rapid response time. Data is automatically copied to different nodes for fault tolerance and easy dissemination. Apple, Netflix, and the Chinese search engine Easou are the open-source project’s most significant commercial deployments. Constant Contact, CERN, Comcast, eBay, GitHub, Instagram, and more than 1,500 more businesses use it.

Renovate:

Renovate is a must-have code maintenance tool for keeping everything up to date. Renovate was acquired by WhiteSource in November 2019 and is aimed to save developers time and reduce security risk in software projects by automating dependency upgrades. We definitely like Renovate a lot, primarily because of its open-first philosophy and ability to assist a well-coordinated and effective open source security policy.

One of Renovate’s primary features is recognizing dependencies across many languages and file kinds. It checks for new versions regularly and offers changelogs and commit histories with each update. You can also run your existing suite of tests after each upgrade to avoid regression mistakes.

React Native:

React Native is a famous GitHub project that allows users to create native mobile apps using only JavaScript. It’s comparable to React (a popular JavaScript toolkit for building user interfaces), but its building pieces are native components instead of web components.

Users can use it to construct rich mobile UIs that look and feel like programs written in Objective-C, Java, or Swift. It does, however, play well with the other three, so if you want to use native code to optimize some components, that’s acceptable as well.

Pattern Lab:

Pattern Lab is a set of tools that will assist you in website development that follow the principles of atomic design. This entails breaking down interfaces into smaller components and working within a UI design system that you’ve created specifically for your needs. Brad Frost’s two businesses, Atomic Design and Pattern Lab, have grown in prominence since their inception.

Bootstrap:

Bootstrap is a front-end component framework that uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to help you create responsive, mobile-first websites. It is one of the most popular open-source projects on GitHub. Twitter first released bootstrap in 2011. As the project developed in popularity, its authors, Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton, decided to detach it from Twitter and move it to its open-source organization.

Bootstrap features a compact footprint, minimal integration, and a visually appealing interface. You can use a web-based customizer to adjust it to your open source project: checkboxes can be used to add or delete components and jQuery plugins, and variables can be customized via a web form.

There’s a 12-column responsive grid, font, and form controls, and it works with mobile browsers thanks to responsive CSS. One of our 19 fantastic free Bootstrap themes could also be helpful here.

Conclusion:

It’s crucial to remember to give back to the open-source community as the use of open source grows, as does our reliance on the open-source projects that power and support the software products we develop. While several of the tasks we highlighted have a passionate community of maintainers and supporters, including some of the world’s largest tech companies, some open source project maintainers have struggled to get support for the components they have painstakingly constructed and maintained.