FullStack Development: The Essentials You Need to Bring Your App To Life

If you are reading this blog, you certainly understand that there’s a key difference between building your Enterprise app because someone thought it would be a “fun” idea; and truly building an application to the exacting standards that will ensure your mobile platform will answer the challenges laid by your internal or external stakeholders for the long haul.

For those who understand that the second option is truly the ONLY option, now is the time to decide how to best realize your app’s potential – layering in the tools, killer features, and interactive opportunities that will propel your business forward - all systems go!

Crossing this next bridge is truly where the rubber, as it were, will hit the road. The selection of a programming language, relevant platform, modern framework, storage, databases, hosting providers, an administration interface, permissions, and a content manager, all loom large if you are to get your app right the FIRST time.

You have dozens upon dozens of architectural decisions to make, and you want to be confident you are making the right ones. You will want to incorporate the most current technologies that will allow for rapid development, continuous repetition, maximum efficiency, speed, agility and a host of others.

In short, you want to use a “recipe” of the best technologies available to help your business succeed -- in both your short-term and the long-range plan.

Enterprise – Meet Your Match

The FullStack Development arsenal ready, quite simply, is the only way to meet the unique needs of your Enterprise’s app aspirations. At iTexico, we live and breathe the FullStack JavaScript paradigm – sticking to a single development language across multiple layers while creating an incredibly flexible and dynamic environment for the production of web apps. We use JavaScript not only for client and server development, but to build, test, and template the app from top to bottom.

Let’s take a closer look at the layers in a JavaScript Stack, beginning with the base (backend API) and moving up to the top (front-end framework).

Data Sources

In order for mobile apps to be of greater use to enterprise, access to existing corporate data is essential. Most mobile applications are being developed as an extension to an existing platform and might be used by employees, sales teams, B2E operations, or as a B2C consumer sales channel. Existing data sources typically reside in the corporate data center or private cloud, and contain business critical data.

NodeJS

We start with mobile back end in Node.js, which is an open-source platform for running JavaScript on the server, used for developing server-side web applications.

Express

Express is a flexible Node.js web app framework that provides a strong set of features for mobile applications without obscuring widely adopted Node features.

Loopback.IO

LoopBack is an open-source mobile API tier, built on top of Node.js and interacting with various services and data sources, while addressing the shortcomings of existing mobile backend services only available on public clouds with limited enterprise access. LoopBack can be run on-premises or in the cloud with enterprise connectors, allowing remote access to functions that support the dynamic saving of data from mobile clients.

Angular SDK & SKD Docs

A software developer’s kit (SDK) is a set of programs used by a programmer to write application programs and includes a visual screen builder, an editor, a compiler, a linker, and sometimes, additional facilities.

AngularJS

AngularJS is an open-source web application framework maintained by Google that aims to simplify both the development and the testing of mobile applications by providing a framework for client-side model-view-controller (MVC) and model-view-viewmodel (MVVM) architectures.

Docular

Docular is part of a NodeJS package that generates documentation based on AngularJS’s documentation generation implementation. Docular will render documentation embedded within your script files or within non-script files.

Automated Test: Unit & E2E

Unit tests take a small piece of the product and test it in isolation – creating a feedback loop. They are quick and reliable, and have the benefit of isolating failures to make bug fixes easier. End-to-end tests are run after the entire application is built and deployed, and simulate real user experiences.

AngularJS Directives

Directives are one of the most vital components of any AngularJS application and are often necessary to create application-specific directives. A directive is something that introduces new syntax -- markers on a DOM element which attach a specific behavior or outcome.

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is an open-source collection of tools for creating mobile applications containing HTML and CSS based design templates as well as JavaScript extensions, which facilitate the development of rich and dynamic websites and web apps. Bootstrap is a front-end framework for UI.

Though seemingly arduous, the climb to the top of this particular pyramid is necessary to produce an app-development outcome that is worth the journey. In our next blog, we’ll drop down even deeper, to help you better understand some additional tools that power our Fullstack Development process.

About the Author

Abhijeet Pradhan is the Former CTO and Co-Founder of iTexico, a multi-platform mobile app and fullstack software design and development firm with over 100+ developers, which includes Extended Team as a Service (eTaaS). Abhijeet is passionate about technology and its applications to everyday consumer and business life.