The Rise of Web Tech in the Enterprise

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s why we created this infographic to highlight some of the key findings from a recent survey that was conducted by Forrester and commissioned by Sencha. At a high level, the results showed that web technology has gone mainstream and more organizations are shifting away from native development to improve productivity and deliver increasingly sophisticated web applications to market.

Download the full report.

Successful Enterprises Are Selecting Web Technology

Successful organizations know the market’s demand for increasingly sophisticated web applications is growing. And organizations are expected to deliver high quality applications that run across a wide variety of platforms, browsers, and operating systems. iOS and Android represent the largest platforms for developing apps, with almost three quarters of the companies saying that they are developing apps for either platform. Sixty percent also plan to build apps for a Microsoft desktop Windows browser. With this fragmentation, it’s no surprise that the development phase of the software development lifecycle has resulted in the largest budget overruns. Enterprises are now choosing HTML5 because they realize the high costs caused by device and OS fragmentation can be best solved by the cross-platform support of web apps.

Sencha: A Comprehensive Platform For Building Cross-Platform Web Applications

Not all platforms and frameworks for creating web applications are created equal. Survey respondents indicated that the richness of the feature set was the most important factor in selecting a web technology provider. Sencha provides a comprehensive and robust platform for organizations looking to design, develop, deploy, and manage cross-platform web applications.

With the introduction of Ext JS 6, developers can now create next gen Universal Applications (desktop, tablet, and smartphone apps), using the same codebase, delivering the right experience for each device type. By separating the business logic from the view logic, developers have the option to create sophisticated user experiences that map to the devices their users choose. By designing the view portion separately, the developer can also consider the context in which the app is being used.

With the Sencha platform, developers can take advantage of a rich client library of pre-tested and integrated components such as grids, pivot grid for data analytics, trees, charts, and many more. Developers don’t need to waste time assembling and integrating a variety of third-party components and then spending time to support, maintain, and upgrade the Frankenstein-like stack. Common integration problems often include testing browser compatibility, component interoperability, and an inefficient build process. In a recent webinar conducted by my colleague, Lee Boonstra, she found that to replicate the functionality in a relatively simple music player universal application she built with Ext JS 6, she would have needed at least 10 different components from numerous providers – and still the application wouldn’t support legacy browsers such as IE 8. Organizations also need to look at the overall cost of the solution including training (or lack thereof), maintenance, and support over the long haul. Just evaluating license fees can be extremely short-sighted. Learn more about the shortcomings of microframeworks such as Angular in my recent blog post – Why Ext JS Apps Scale, When Others Don’t.

Solving Deployment and Management Pain

The study indicated that application deployment was one of the biggest pain points associated with web applications. We think that’s because so many organizations are using a legacy deployment process for their modern web applications. With this process, teams need to wrap their applications with something like Cordova and then submit it to the consumer app stores. Approvals can take up to 15 days – if everything goes smoothly. And teams need to go through this process every time they want to make any change to their applications.

With Sencha Web Application Manager, applications are deployed to a single secure container that can reside on the desktop, on a tablet, or smartphone. Users only need to download the client application from an app store once. After that, all of their application updates will be automatically made available to them in the secure container. And the headaches of trying to support legacy browsers goes away. Developers write code to target only one modern browser which greatly accelerates development efforts and makes the development of an HTML5 app very easy. Coupled with Ext JS, all of the browser dependencies and pitfalls are handled. And by using the Sencha platform, developers get device API access. Learn more

Securing Web Applications

In addition to deployment challenges, web application security was cited as the biggest pain point by survey respondents. It’s no wonder popular native packaging solutions such as Cordova make it easy to copy the binary executable for a packaged app, unzip the binary, and retrieve sensitive resources, including the source code. Local application data is also stored unencrypted by default. With Web Application Manager, all application resources are protected. Learn more

Improving Developer Productivity

The number one reason organizations said they plan to move to web technology was to improve developer productivity. Improving productivity can help organizations stay on budget and on schedule. We’ve recently introduced a number of new tools to increase developer productivity including the JetBrains IDE Plugin and Sencha Inspector for application debugging and theming. Plus, organizations can take advantage of Sencha Cmd to help scaffold the application. Development managers know the opportunity cost of cobbling together microframework-based solutions such as Angular. Sencha provides everything a developer needs to design, develop, deploy, and manage an enterprise-class, cross-platform web application and get their applications to market faster.