case study Archives - OpenJS Foundation

Dec 21

Node.js Case Study: Ryder

By rromoff Blog, Case Study, member blog, Node.js

Ryder Delivers Real-Time Visibility in Less Time with Profound Logic’s Node.js solution

This case study was initially published on Profound Logic’s website. Profound Logic is a member of the OpenJS Foundation.

Ryder’s low-code, screen scraping solution was an effective solution for a long time, yet, as their customers’ expectations evolved, they had an opportunity to upgrade.

To keep up with consumer demand, they implemented Profound Logic’s Node.js development products to create RyderView. Their new web-based solution helped transform usability for their customers and optimize internal business processes for an overall better experience.

The Challenge

Third-party freight carriers across North America rely on Ryder’s Last Mile legacy systems to successfully deliver packages. Constantly adding features the legacy system made for a a monolithic application that was no longer intuitive nor scalable.

The Solution

The Ryder team, lead by Barnabus Muthu, IT & Application Architect, wanted to develop an intuitive web application that provided real-time access to critical information. Muthu wanted to balance the need for new development with his legacy programs’ extensive business logic.

Profound Logic’s Node.js development solutions were a great fit and allowed Muthu to expose his IBM i databases via API to push and pull data from external cloud systems in real-time. He was also able to drive efficiency on dev time by using npm packages. Using Node.js, Ryder was able to built a modern, web-based application that no longer relied on green screens, while leveraging his existing RPG business logic.

The Result

This new solution was named RyderView and it transformed usability for its customers, translating to faster onboarding and reduced training costs for Ryder.

For third-party users, it led to improved productivity as the entire time-consuming processes were made obsolete. Previously, Ryder’s third-party agents used paper-based templates to capture information while in the field. Now that Ryder’s new application used microservices to push and pull data from iDB2, end users were upgraded to a mobile application. These advancements benefited Ryder as well, allowing them to eliminate paperwork, printing costs, and the licensing of a document processing software.

Read the full case study: https://www.profoundlogic.com/case-study/ryder/

Dec 18

Love12

AMP Project Case Study: VOGSY

By rromoff AMP, Blog, Case Study

VOGSY Improves Services Firms’ Quote-to-Cash Speed by 80% with AMP-powered dynamic emails

The full case study was originally published on the AMP website. AMP is a hosted project at the OpenJS Foundation.

VOGSY is a professional services automation solution built on Google Workspace. By offering a single source of engagement to efficiently manage projects, resources, tasks, timesheets and billing, VOGSY streamlines services firms’ business operations from quote to cash, preventing handoff delays between sales, project delivery, and accounting teams.

Challenge

VOGSY was facing challenges due to siloed departments and disparate tools. Seeing an opportunity to never drop the quote-to-cash baton, VOGSY implemented AMP For Email to send actionable workflow emails directly to its users’ inboxes.

Results

The results of using the open source project led to huge efficiency gains for VOGSY clients including an 80 percent increase in approval speed for invoices, timesheets, quotes and expenses.

To read more about the benefits for VOGSY read the full case study: https://amp.dev/success-stories/vogsy/

Oct 07

Love7

Electron Update: Community Discord Server and Hacktoberfest

By rromoff Blog, Electron, Project Update

This blog was originally posted on the Electron blog. Electron is an Impact Project at the OpenJS Foundation.

Community Discord Server and Hacktoberfest

Join us for community bonding and a month-long celebration of open-source.

Electron Community Discord Launch

Electron’s Outreach Working Group is excited to announce the launch of our official community Discord server!

Why a new Discord server?

In its early days as the backbone of the Atom text editor, community discussion on the Electron framework occurred in a single channel in Atom’s Slack workspace. As time passed and the two projects were increasingly decoupled, the relevance of the Atom workspace to the Electron project decreased, and maintainer participation in the Slack channel declined in the same manner.

Up until now, we had still been redirecting our broader community to the Atom Slack workspace, even though we’ve had many reports from folks who have had trouble receiving invitations, and few of our core maintainers were frequenting the channel.

We’re setting up this shiny new server to be a central discussion hub for the community where you can get the latest news on all things Electron.

Get in here!

So far, the server’s membership consists of a few maintainers who have been working together to set it up, but we’re so excited to chat with you all! Come ask for help, keep up to date with Electron releases, or just hang out with other developers. We’ve got a handy invite for you that’ll give you access to the server!

Hacktoberfest 2020

As a large and long-running open-source project, Electron wouldn’t have been nearly as successful without all the contributions from its community, from code submissions to bug reports to documentation changes, and much more. That’s why we believe in the importance of participating in Hacktoberfest to usher in a wider community of developers of all skill levels into the project.

Odds and ends

This year, we don’t have a wider project to give you all to work on, but we’d like to focus on opportunities to contribute across the Electron JavaScript ecosystem.

Look out for issues tagged hacktoberfest across our various repositories, including the main electron/electron repository, the electron/electronjs.org website, electron/fiddle, and electron-userland/electron-forge!

P.S. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, we also have a backlog of issues marked with help wanted tags if you’re looking for more of a challenge.

Stuck? Come chat with us!

Moreover, it’s also no coincidence that the grand opening of our Discord server coincides with the largest celebration of open-source software of the year. Check out the #hacktoberfest channel to ask for help on your Hacktoberfest PR. In case you missed it, here’s the invite link again!

Have feedback on this post? Let @electronjs know on Twitter.

Need help or found a bug? Contact us.

Sep 30

Love15

OpenJS In Action: ESRI powering COVID-19 response with open source

By rromoff Blog, Case Study, Dojo, ESLint, Grunt, OpenJS In Action

The OpenJS In Action series features companies that use OpenJS Foundation projects to develop efficient, effective web technologies.

Esri, a geographic information systems company, is using predictive models and interactive maps with JavaScript technologies to help the world better understand and respond to the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, they have built tools that visualize how social distancing precautions can help reduce cases and the burden on healthcare systems. They have also helped institutions like Johns Hopkins create their own informational maps by providing a template app and resources to extend functionality.

Esri uses OpenJS Foundation projects such as Dojo Toolkit, Grunt, ESLint and Intern to increase developer productivity and deliver high-quality applications that help the world fight back against the pandemic.

Esri’s contributions to the COVID response effort and an explanation of how they created the underlying technologies are available at this video:

https://youtu.be/KLnht-1F3Ao

Robin Ginn, Executive Director of the OpenJS Foundation, spoke with Kristian Ekenes, Product Engineer at Esri, to highlight the work his company has been doing. Esri normally creates mapping software, databases and tools to help businesses manage spatial data. However, Ekenes started work on a tool called Capacity Analysis when the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread.

Capacity Analysis is a configurable app that allows organizations to display and interact with results from two scenarios predicting a hospital’s ability to meet the demand of COVID-19 patients given configurable parameters, such as the percentage of people following social distancing guidelines. Health experts can create two hypothetical scenarios using one of two models: Penn Medicine’s COVID-19 Hospital Impact Model for Epidemics (CHIME) or the CDC’s COVID-19Surge model. Then they can deploy their own version of Capacity Analysis to view how demand for hospital beds, ICU beds, and ventilators varies by time and geography in each scenario. This tool is used by governments worldwide to better predict how the pandemic will challenge specific areas.

During the interview, Ekenes spoke on the challenges that come with taking on ambitious projects like Capacity Analysis. Esri has both a large developer team and a diverse ecosystem of applications. This makes it difficult to maintain consistency in the API and SDKs deployed across desktop and mobile platforms. To overcome these challenges, Esri utilizes several OpenJS Foundation projects including Dojo Toolkit, Grunt, ESLint and Intern.

Ekenes explained that Grunt and ESLint increase developer productivity by providing real-time feedback when writing code. The linter also standardizes work across developers by indicating when incorrect practices are being used. This reduces the number of pull requests between collaborators and saves time for the entire team. Intern allows developers to write testing modules and create high-quality apps by catching bugs early. In short, Esri helps ensure consistent and thoroughly tested applications by incorporating OpenJS Foundation projects into their work.

Sep 22

Love8

Expedia Group: Building better testing pipelines with opensource.

By rromoff Blog, Case Study, ESLint, OpenJS In Action

The OpenJS In Action series features companies that use OpenJS Foundation projects to help develop efficient, effective web technologies.

Software developers at global travel company Expedia Group are using JavaScript, ESLint and robust testing pipelines to reduce inconsistency and duplication in their code. Switching from Java and JSP to Node.js has streamlined development and design systems. Beyond that, Expedia developers are looking into creating a library of reusable design and data components for use across their many brands and pages.

Robin Ginn, executive director of the OpenJS Foundation, interviewed Tiffany Le-Nguyen, Software Development Engineer at Expedia Group.

Expedia is an example of how adoption of new technologies and techniques can improve customer and developer experiences.

A video featuring Expedia is available here: https://youtu.be/FDF6SgtEvYY

Robin Ginn, executive director of the OpenJS Foundation, interviewed Tiffany Le-Nguyen, Software Development Engineer at Expedia Group. Le-Nguyen explained how accessibility and performance concerns led developers to modernize Expedia’s infrastructure. One of the choices they made was to integrate ESLint into their testing pipeline to catch bugs and format input before content was pushed live. ESLint also proved to be a huge time-saver — it enforced development standards and warned developers when incorrect practices were being used.

ESLint was especially useful for guiding new developers through JavaScript, Node.js and TypeScript. Expedia made the bold move to switch most of their applications from Java and JSP to Node.js and TypeScript. Le-Nguyen is now able to catch most errors and quickly push out new features by combining Node.js with Express and a robust testing pipeline.

However, Expedia is used globally to book properties and dates for trips. Users reserve properties with different currencies across different time zones. This makes it difficult to track when a property was reserved and whether the correct amount was paid. Luckily, Expedia was able to utilize Globalize, an OpenJS project that provides number formatting and parsing, date and time formatting and currency formatting for languages across the world. Le-Nguyen was able to simplify currency tracking across continents by integrating Globalize into the project.

To end the talk, Le-Nguyen suggested that web developers should take another look into UI testing. Modern testing tools have simplified the previously clunky process. Proper implementation of a good testing pipeline improves the developer experience and leads to a better end product for the user.

Sep 11

Love5

How Node.js saved the U.S. Government $100K

By rromoff Blog, Case Study, Node.js, OpenJS World

The following blog is based on a talk given at the OpenJS Foundation’s annual OpenJS World event and covers solutions created with Node.js.

When someone proposes a complicated, expensive solution ask yourself: can it be done cheaper, better and/or faster? Last year, an external vendor wanted to charge $103,000 to create an interactive form and store the responses. Ryan Hillard, Systems Developer at the U.S. Small Business Administration, was brought in to create a less expensive, low-maintenance alternative to the vendor’s proposal. Hillard was able to create a solution using ~320 lines of code and $3000. In the talk below Hillard describes what the difficulties were and how his Node.js solution fixed the problem.

Last year, Hillard started work on a government’s case management system that received and processed feedback from external and internal users. Unfortunately, a recent upgrade and rigorous security measures prevented external users from leaving feedback. Hillard needed to create a secure interactive form and then store the data. However, the solution also needed to be cheap, easy to maintain and stable.

Hillard decided to use three common services: Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda and Node.js. Together, these pieces provided a simple and versatile way to capture and then store response data. Maintenance is low because the servers are maintained by Amazon. Additionally, future developers can easily alter and improve the process as all three services/languages are commonly used.

To end his talk, Hillard discussed the design and workflow processes that led him to his solution. He compares JavaScript to a giant toolkit with hundreds of libraries and dependencies — a tool for every purpose. However, this variety can be counterproductive as the complexity – and thus the management time – increases.

Developers should ask themselves how they can solve their problems without introducing anything new. In other words, size does matter — the smallest, simplest toolkit is the best!