Getting Older is Inevitable but being Young is a choice – Time to Look at the Technology Advancements
Many organizations and corporates all over the world utilize various kinds of portals and websites to conduct their business processes, promote their business/services, perform transactions, share information, manage important documents and communicate with clients and customers back and forth.
With changing times and dynamics of the market, the technology on which these websites and portals are developed becomes outdated resulting in an inability to keep pace with the increasing work processes and competition. Moreover, old legacy technologies make it difficult for these portals and applications to respond according to modern requirements and demands. On the other hand, several new technologies and processes keep emerging day in and day out which promises better responsiveness and flexibility. Due to this, businesses realize the need to upgrade their websites and applications in order to deliver better products and services to customers and enable faster turnaround.
Using old things is not just uncool but it’s something that Limits your Progress – Problems with Traditional Technologies
All of you would agree with this especially when the website or application you use is one of the main sources of your business operations and income. It becomes imperative to embrace new technologies and ditch the old one if you face one or more of the following challenges in the existing technology or version of your application or website:
- Incompatibility issues with certain systems and applications
- Frequent errors faced during operations
- Inaccessibility of high-end media
- Flat UI
- Issues in managing access controls
- Configuration issues
- Security and user-authorization issues
Benefits of being young – Why upgrading to New Technologies is better
When you know, you have invested a significant part of your resources in developing a website, portal or application, it is advisable to keep it rolling with the new technology even if you do not face any of the above problems mostly because new technologies
- Promises reduction in cost
- Renders more flexibility
- Comes with better development architecture
- Provides better development support
- Gives power to combat with complexities
A Real Story where the young Killed the Old – Migration from Old Technology to New Technology
A USA-based company (involved in providing online faxing service) due to increase in the number of fax users and problems in managing the accounts and hierarchies in its portal realized the need to bid adieu to traditional technology. The portal was built in old J2ee technology and the company decided to migrate its admin section, i.e. the backend of the portal to Grails technology and improve the UI and functionalities to manage the users accounts and fax number assignment process.
In order to get the things done quickly, the company outsourced the project of migration from J2ee to Grails to third party solutions provider.
If you are a developer, you might be knowing about Grails, if not here’s a short brief about Grails:
Grails is a rapid application development framework that is built upon popular Java frameworks like J2EE, Hibernate, and Spring. Grails offers some well know features like scaffolding, don’t repeat code and convention over configuration which makes the whole development process rapid. Grails frameworks also support 700+ plugins which can help boost up the development.
Migrating to new technology (Grails) from the old Java technology provided enormous benefits to the company and eliminated the issues faced in the older technology version of the portal.
- Streamlined management of user accounts
- Better analytics of registered users
- Elimination of complex coding procedure for configurations and maintenance requirements
- Quicker turnaround of work process
- User-friendly UI and navigation which led to better processing of backend workflows
- Ability to customize features
The company after migrating from old technology to new saw a huge difference in the interoperability of the portal and reduced the overall cost of maintaining the portal in the old technology architecture.
Conclusion:
This is not a story of a single company that has actually migrated its portal or application to something newer and better. Many companies in order to leverage the power of new and advanced technology often migrate or upgrade their applications and websites. The only thing you need to understand is the right time and the right technology.
About the Author: Boni Satani is Java developer associated with Cygnet Infotech – an offshore IT Development Company. Get in touch with him for enterprise java application development. Follow Boni on Twitter or Google+.