Month: April 2021

PowerApps, a New Way to Develop App Faster

Well, there should be an App for that. Every time we think of an idea or a requirement the very first thing that crosses our mind is that there should be an app for this. Especially, organizations now do not want to overwhelm their employees with multiple apps to get a simple task done. This is where PowerApps step in.

PowerApps is a smart way to organize resources, projects and also enhance business productivity. It is a simple way to build app design and make testing easy, PowerApps are a user-friendly platform that can help you to quickly identify what your idea wants to display in an app and also how you want it to work with the devices.

PowerApps is a built of Microsoft and is defined as a suite of services, connector, and apps that offers a robust application development environment. With it businesses can integrate with other apps making it a key ability to develop apps based on Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and also including SharePoint Online, Excel and Dynamics 365.

PowerApps in Businesses

Organizations can make use of PowerApps in processes, such as automation, collaboration, reporting, workflow, and data visualization. And these processes can easily run as mobile apps be it on Android, iOS, or Windows. Also, PowerApps are no code making it restricted to rogue code that means no one will be able to add code that can make changes to your apps. Maintaining its stable and easily available for long term. But in case you require customization in your business app that PowerApps just cannot provide for it you can add on REST API with PowerApps to get the best of both worlds.

PowerApps can help businesses in tracking assets such as hardware, mobile devices and software licenses; conduct due diligence on new clients, covering various criteria and interrogating various databases; develop model standard documents such as contracts using automation; and database handling.

Along with these PowerApps have sample apps that you can work from scratch or either customize it. It also has more than 200 connectors that can help in the integration of system and data, easy to create user interfaces with drag and drop facility, high composition with Dynamics tools and Office 365, and active PowerApps community.  

PowerApps brings in the capability of low code development this has speeden up the process of development and given highly sophisticated assets that are required for a high-end app. 

Customized Components in PowerApps

Microsoft has released frameworks that have the ability to develop custom control using coding that can directly reflect in PowerApps. This also includes two new plugins PowerApps CLI and Visual Studio that give out high productivity tooling in order to make end-to-end development experience smooth. Organizations that are using these plugins to build a stunning array of custom UI with the component framework. 

Types of Apps that can be created with PowerApps

With PowerApps you can build three kinds of apps

  1. Canvas – Canvas Apps are those apps that can be designed by dragging and dropping elements onto a canvas and the logic can be created like excel sheet expression. 
  2. Model-driven – Model-driven apps are component defined. They do not require code and the apps you can create can either be simple or complicated. But unlike canvas app where the developer has complete control over app layout, with model-driven apps the layout is determined for you and largely designated by the components you add to the app.
  3. Portal – PowerApps portals can create external websites that allow users outside organization to sign in a range of identities that can create and view data in Dataverse.

Industry type application development that can be built via PowerApps

  1. Financial, Sales, and accounting
  2. Planning and decision-making
  3. Quality control
  4. Administrative 
  5. Procurement and supply chain management

These are mere some example a lot can be developed through PowerApps. 

PowerApps, a quick and easy way of application development

Because of low code development, PowerApps can be built 5 times more quickly than any simple app. PowerApps have already been used by several big companies to develop custom applications, some of these include American Red Cross and Virgin Atlantic Airlines. 

PowerApps are particularly useful in scenarios when a connector between different data sources and in prototyping. They can also be used to customize and expand Office 365 and Dynamics 365. Developers can use one of the templates or can even build an app from scratch.

Developers can expand PowerApps with coding for report creation, in order to integrate third party or external applications, or to fulfill specific UI requirements.

Apps that are developed with PowerApps are not stand alone apps, instead they are available to end users through a container app on mobiles. Users just need to download the official PowerApps to access the applications shared with them. 

Benefits of PowerApps

  • no code app development
  • fast time to market development
  • less resources required
  • inexpensive
  • User centric app development
  • Fast prototype development 
  • higher ROI
  • Additional Office 365 integration 

You can build apps based on Power Platform data storage CDS  and Common Data Model called the CDM, and also Canvas UI. The User Interface can further be extended with code such as JavaScript or TypeScript with React and Angular frameworks to develop personalized User Interface controls of Microsoft Professional Capabilities Framework called the PCF.

The custom business logic while the application is building can be implemented with Power Automate and entity plugins. 

Additional Features of PowerApps

Microsoft has developed an AI Builder that allows PowerApps Artificial Intelligence and machine learning frameworks to build smarter and advanced applications.

Just like Microsoft cite has the authority to analyse and categorise customer feedback responses and accordingly take actions. This creates a marketing automation to the next level. The AI builder also has the text recognizer component and additionally it also brings in the opportunities to integrate blockchain to develop even more sophisticated apps.

The AI Builder is a complete solution that brings the power of Microsoft AI through a point and click experience and is directly integrated into Power Apps and Power Automate.

To know more about iView Labs, kindly log on to our website www.iviewlabs.com and to get in touch with us with your queries and needs just write us an email on info@iviewlabs.com and sales@iviewlabs.com. Download the latest portfolio to see our work.

Angular VS ReactJs in the Front End Development World

When it comes to front-end development Angular and ReactJs are considered to be the top two technologies. But to choose between the two is one of the most confusing decisions as both of them have their advantages. Angular and ReactJs both solve frontend development problems but in their own ways. 

Merely sometimes back it was enough for the business to have a website inorder to reach their broader market. But today statistics have shown a huge increase in the types of business websites that are being consumed by the audiences for better interaction with the brand. 

So, the debate between ReactJs and Angular has been an ongoing one. Since both are coming up with new versions every year and also brining in great features, so the decision to select one has become very difficult. 

A brief on ReactJs and Angular 

About ReactJs

ReactJs is an interactive user interface, meaning it is a necessary element of the frontend development of applications. It is a library that you can use to determine how your application is going to look to your users and how they can operate and interact with it. In other words, as per the Model-View-Controller framework, ReactJS creates the upfront view of the website. 

About Angular

In regard with ReactJs, Angular is a complete framework that is built on TypeScript that has the capability to spin code efficiently. It is a wholesome toolkit that has everything to build an entire application or website. 

ReactJs Vs Angular – Showing the difference between the two 

  1. Underlying Architecture 

ReactJs is a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework with a rendering UI library, that means it uses written code or JSX to create the interface. Biggest advantage is that it does not force on the architecture of your apps and allows you a great deal of freedom during the development process.

Whereas Angular, is a complete MVC that can develop an entire architecture of a website or an app. The little limitation it carries on with it is that it offers minimal flexibility, meaning unlike ReactJs you cannot add functions on the developed architecture making it limited within the scoop of the tools. 

  1. Components 

These are one of the USPs of Angular and ReactJs. Components are the small chunks of codes that can be added to add a specific functionality. But both of these technologies have a very clear distinction in them such as –

ReactJs has a number of free as well as paid UI components that can easily add functionalities to your app or website. Also, these components can be built using JavaScripts. One of the biggest advantage of building your frontend with ReactJs is that it has community that keeps on adding new chunks of code which can be used by anyone.  

Unlike React, Angular doesn’t only imbibe components even though it follows a component-based approach, Angular is a complete framework that can help you easily develop modern, reactive, and component-driven frontend of an application or a website. Which implies that Angular offers more options than developing components which includes such as validations, routing, state management, form, and lots to develop large applications.

  1. Performance 

This is one of the major aspect, analyzing the impact of technology on the performance. 

Document Object Model is the factor that decides the performance. DOM is a programming interface that makes the browser read the object and nodes in applications’ XML or HTML documents. And both Angular and ReactJs maintain their DOM very differently. 

ReactJs is considered to have an edge over Angular but only in its certain respects. Such as the virtual DOM allows its apps to virtually update the changes without rewriting the entire HTML document. This renders updates much quicker, allowing lightning-fast performance regardless of the size of the application, making it great in terms of scalability. 

Whereas, Angular being the complete framework of frontend development in its regular DOM feature makes the application slow in performance. This is the reason that Angular is ideal for developing single-page applications that only updates a single view at a time. 

This way Angular presents lower performance with large and complex multi-faceted applications. However, Angular has Change Detection technique to optimize performance.

  1. Templates 

In ReactJs, templates are called JavaScript XML or JSX, which combines the JavaScript code and markup in one line of code this helps in developing user interfaces efficiently. It is an extension to JavaScriptthat makes use of HTML-like syntax where you can build components by combining code and markup.

On the other hand, Angular uses advance HTML that has Angular ng-if ng-or directives. This indicates that you have to properly learn to code in advanced HTML to code the frontend correctly.  

  1. Data binding 

ReactJs and Angular both has components to render UI. Things to consider when using ReactJs or Angular is their component’s logic that has all the data related to a component that gets displayed in the User Interface. So, the connection between data and the component’s logic is data-binding. 

React has only one way of data binding which means that the model state is updated and then it renders changes to the user interface. But if you change the UI that doesn’t mean that the model state will also change. For that you will have to figure out so ways such as state management libraries or callbacks. 

Whereas in Angular there is two way of data binding that means if you change the UI then the model state will also change and if you change the model state then the user interface will also change. This gives an added advantage to Angular as compared to ReactJs. 

  1. Dependency Injection

It has been seen that certain dependency injection is almost indispensable in data-binding. This is because some of them helps with decoupling where there is no additional data layering in the application model. 

This is a problem in the ReactJs technology as Dependency injection (DI) goes against current architecture of functional programming and immutability. 

But in Angular dependency injection makes it capable of creating different lifecycles of different stores. This implies that the stores creates space for the components mount that makes them smoothly and limitlessly available to components’ children.  

In ReactJs the language makes use of global app state that maps different components but this way you will be introducing bugs when cleaning component unmount. 

Websites that are Built on Angular and ReactJs 

Forbes which is one of the world’s most visited websites is built on Angular. The website has the capacity to respond to more than 74 million queries on a monthly basis in the United States alone. Angular has given the website the authority to work on reusable codebase, provides uninterrupted user experience, and also the support and maintenance are easy. 

Example of ReactJs is supreme Facebook, the website is built on React Library and its products. Facebook developers use React to create responsive UI. React and also maintain high website performance. Lately, Facebook has supported 2.45 billion monthly active users and this number is continuously growing. 

To Conclude 

So, before you kickstart your frontend development it is important that you keep these aspects in your mind. With these it is also necessary for you to know that the learning curve of these two technologies are very different. As ReactJs is JavaScript programming language, it is way easier to work on this language because of its simple design, detailed documentation, libraries, and JSX. In contrast with ReactJs, Angular is complex and developer needs to learn the syntax. But once there is a hand on syntax the technology gives multiple options to solve a single problem. 

To know more about iView Labs, kindly log on to our website www.iviewlabs.com and to get in touch with us with your queries and needs just write us an email on info@iviewlabs.com and sales@iviewlabs.com. Download the latest portfolio to see our work.