#open source solutions

The popularity of Enterprise-level Open Source Software is Attributed to Benefits like Adaptability, Customization, and Affordability

Executives are choosing Open Source software and finding great success. More and more organizations are choosing it over proprietary software and a lot more will make this transition in years to come. Understanding the concept of open-source software and its functionality is key to utilizing the benefits. Charter Global has the knowledge and experience for the most successful Open Source transition.

What is Open Source Software?

As the name suggests, open source software is one whose original source code is publicly available and can be modified at will. This type of software either has its source code publicly available or includes it somewhere inside the compiled software download, making it easy for the user to modify, customize or add/remove features based on their preferences.

Contributions to Open Source

The open source concept has contributed significantly to software development. Because of its open nature, it becomes easy for contributors to add new features, extend features and fix bugs. These changes usually reflect in newer versions along with the source code for further improvement. This makes it a formidable system that can run for a long term and is adaptive to all kinds of conditions.

Affordability:

There is no need to spend a fortune on proprietary software where additional charges for maintenance and software updates are involved. With open source software, contributors make all the needed changes. It performs well in real-time because of the contributions from multiple individual experts. There is always a customized version that meets specific requirements out there!

Customizable:

Open source software shares its source code, making it quite easy to understand and modify as required. This is unlike commercial software, where every time a change is required in the product, the vendor has to be contacted, and then wait for them to deliver the feature (which can take forever).

Adaptive:

The source code of the open source software is available publicly and its modifications are not limited to a particular person or organization. Additionally, it has an extendibility scope that is not limited to any particular design or architecture. Because of these factors, anyone can use the open source software, as it was designed using ideas from multiple people with varied intentions. Therefore it stands a better chance of performing well in complex scenarios.

Solid Security:

Security is better in the open source system, because there are experienced experts from all over, always looking out for possible security loopholes and fixing them. This is one feature that gives the open source an edge over proprietary software.

Better Support:

Typical open source software has numerous documentation as well as community wikis that host answers to frequently asked questions. Individuals and group experts who worked on the technology/platform are available on online open source forums. Some of the open source vendors are also available to provide support for the software for a small fee.

Finding Resources:

As mentioned in the previous point, resources for open source are available everywhere.  On the other hand, commercial software developers seldom share their codes or documentation to everyone. So, this makes it quite difficult to find the resources or build knowledge in that technology.

Charter Global’s Capabilities in Open Source

Charter Global is known for its expertise in building software and providing services using open source technology. We have successfully developed and delivered hundreds of projects to our clients. Among the many services we render at Charter Global, we develop applications and tools using open source.

PostgreSQL— a powerful, open source object-relational database system — uses and extends the SQL language combined with many features that safely store and scale the most complicated data workloads. PostgreSQL runs on

all major operating systems, and has powerful add-on’s such as the popular

PostGIS geospatial database extender.

PostgreSQL is considered by industry experts and developers as the best database in the world—a bold statement backed by thirty years of use and a history of success by companies worldwide. This open source relational database offers business benefits, such as cost savings, scalability, enterprise security, and automation.

Free and open source relational database

PostgreSQL, also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance.PostgreSQL has its own license that is largely based on the BSD license. This allows for even greater freedom of use and distribution.

The license applies to the main project code, major contribution extensions, client libraries, connection managers, and most of the associated tools.

Considering the speed that new technologies emerge, maintaining dynamic data systems is crucial in today’s digital environment. PostgreSQL is versatile and expandable, so it can support various use cases with a powerful extension ecosystem, covering different things from time-series data types to geospatial analytics.

Easier and faster development

With the advanced and numerous features that come with PostgreSQL, developers can quickly and easily build applications and administrators can protect data integrity and build fault-tolerant environments. PostgreSQL helps you manage your data no matter how big or small the dataset. 

Companies looking for cost-effective and efficient ways to improve their database management systems frequently choose PostgreSQL. As an open source database solution, PostgreSQL is completely free from licensing restrictions, vendor lock-in potential, or the risk of over-deployment. Expert developers and commercial enterprises who understand the limitations of traditional database systems heavily support PostgreSQL.

Extend PostgreSQL for multiple uses

PostgreSQL has a vibrant community of developers that write ancillary software. This includes plugging in any language, and using it to extend PostgreSQL in any way that seems helpful. It allows developers to create their own functions, data types, operators, aggregates, window functions and other database-related functions.

PostgreSQL also provides some hook functions that allows developers to extend the database without having to go to programming extremes.The ability to assimilate any feature of any other language is unique to PostgreSQL.

Developers can follow the standards, keep up with changes, and update PostgreSQL while it’s live — all of these tasks can be performed for free.

Performance and scalability for large data bases

PostgreSQL supports large database systems where data authentication and read/write speeds are critical.  PostgreSQL enables performance optimizations typically found in proprietary database technology, such as geospatial support and unrestricted concurrency. This makes PostgreSQL extremely efficient when running deep, extensive data analysis across multiple data types.

Broad language support

Due to its compatibility and support of multiple programming languages, PostgreSQL is considered one of the most flexible databases.

Popular coding languages

such as Python, JavaScript, C/C++, Ruby, and others offer mature support for PostgreSQL, allowing developers to perform database tasks in any language without generating system conflicts.

Business continuity

In the event of a disaster, business must maintain continuous operations. Enterprises need a sustainable solution to ensure that production databases remain available at all times. PostgreSQL offers high availability of services through either asynchronous or synchronous replication methods across multiple servers.

The benefits of open source developers collaborating and working together to create scalable and sustainable solutions for your enterprise can help your business grow and adapt to new technologies, while supported by the skilled and knowledgeable database developers. Another major economic benefit is the no-cost use of PostgreSQL which includes its own license, allowing companies to save money on database license fees.

Charter Global Client Spotlight: Successful conversion from a licensed database to an open source database

Google has launched its portable UI Toolkit Flutter 1.0 during its Flutter Live conference in London. Flutter 1.0 is a mobile app development platform allowing its user to write apps that share a single code base across iOS and Android with a Native User Interface.

During the launch, many compared Flutter to React Native by Facebook. React Native relies on JavaScript while Flutter relies on Dart, Google’s in-house programming language, to avoid the need for JavaScript bridge to initiate interactions with the native services by the OS platform. Dart is easy to write codes in and therefore comes with a shorter learning curve compared to JavaScript.

According to a Google post, Flutter enables the “ultimate realization” of Material Design, Google’s own design language for Android, to create a foundation for user interfaces; thus “enables users to build beautiful apps.” The platform is powered by hardware-accelerated Skia 2D that allows lightning speed transitions.

Flutter is free and an open source solutions with a BSD-style license, and includes the contributions of hundreds of developers from around the world. It also develops a new capability for developers and designers to iterate on their apps in real time.

Flutter 1.0 is the first stable release of the platform. The new version focused on stabilization and bug fixes. It also added new features such as Dart 2.1, Add to App, and Platform Views.

Dart 2.1 is an update to Dart which provides smaller code sizes, faster type checks, and better usability for type errors.  According to an announcement by Google, Dart 2.1 version reduced minified output size by 17% and improved compilation time by 15%.

Add to App is a feature that will let users add Flutter easily to an existing app. Currently, the feature is in preview since the APIs and tooling are still in development.

Platform Views enables the inclusion of an Android or iPhone platform control in a Flutter app. For this to work, Google developed two platform view widgets, Android-view and UiKitView. Android support is still in preview and will soon support iOS as well.

Flutter can be used for both UI and back-end instead of using one technology stack for UI and one stack for business logic. It is also aimed to reduce a lot of code as there are customization and pre-defined libraries available in the Flutter SDK.

Google also announced Hummingbird, a web-based implementation of the Flutter runtime which enables Flutter code to run on the standards-based web without change.

Engineers look for remote work as tech breaks geographical barriers- Technology News, Firstpost

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