You might have heard the term ‘web components’ being thrown around in UI discussions. But what are web components? And how did they come about? In this article, I will attempt to cover a brief history of web components and the benefits they bring to teams today. I will also dive into how my team uses them. But first, let’s talk about what they are: Web components are a suite of different technologies that allow you to create reusable custom elements for use in your web applications. The functionality of web components is encapsulated away from the rest of your code. This goes a long way to making them more reusable. There are three main technologies: custom elements and their behavior, the ‘hidden’ shadow DOM, and the flexible HTML templates. These are used together to create versatile custom elements with encapsulated functionality that can be reused wherever you like, without fear of code collisions.

Back in 2011, a guy named Alex Russell first introduced the concept of ‘standard’ web components. A couple of years later Google jump-started the web components ‘revolution’ with the release of the Polymer library. The library was based on web components, and served as the authoritative implementation of Material Design for the web. It was soon after this time, a little over a decade ago, that I began to work on a new web application UI project, for which I decided that web components would be a key technology in my front-end tech stack. There were regrets, especially because of the flood of browser errors. I remember a lot of searching and sifting through obscure documentations and blogs to understand how to ‘glue’ the web components together with my application. A lot of the web component implementations felt experimental and it seemed like they were not completely ready for production, to say the least. It felt exciting for the wrong reasons: It was a new frontier of development, but ultimately it bred discouragement because of the challenges.

The React framework soon came along and changed many things. I, for one, rewrote my application in React and ‘never looked back’. It was so much easier to work with. And I’m sure that other developers, who were once web component hopefuls, had a similar experience. At the time, Facebook didn’t want to use web components and build on top of them because they didn’t fit React’s JSX model used for declaring elements. This was yet another reason to be doubtful about them. But obviously, not everyone was. In 2016, the Custom Elements v1 specification was released, which laid the foundation for designing and using new types of DOM elements. Soon after, in a bold statement by Google, YouTube was rewritten in Polymer web components. They kept evolving Polymer knowing that web components were a web standard, an approved spec that modern browsers had to implement.

In 2017, a few developments started to reaffirm web components as a viable modern front-end technology: First of all, the Polymer team started to develop LitElement, a lightweight framework for creating web components. Secondly, the Ionic team created StencilJS, a JavaScript compiler that generated web components. Both of these became reference technologies for web component development. In 2018, Firefox 63 enabled web component support by default and updated developer tools to support them. With Angular 6, came Angular Elements, allowing for packaging Angular components as custom web components. By the time the Lit framework was released in 2019, people were already realizing the value of having a layer of web components, especially because of the headaches from having so many different front-end frameworks. None of those frameworks were ‘native’ like web components.

In the last five years, web components have matured significantly, gaining wider adoption and becoming a more viable alternative to framework-based components, with key advancements through new features, the development of frameworks, and increased browser support. More recently, there has been a move towards more declarative APIs and the potential for fully declaratively defined web components. Web Components are now a commonplace part of front-end development practices, with major players like GitHub, Apple, and Adobe embracing them. They continue to evolve, with ongoing efforts to improve accessibility and other features like server-side rendering. They also continue to gain traction, with increasing browser support and usage in various projects.

Meanwhile, companies are feeling the pain of having built components using a specific framework. Of course, web components solve this problem; they live in harmony with other frameworks, not against them. Teams don’t have to change their frameworks either. Web components adapt to any JavaScript framework because they are natively supported elements in HTML. It’s the standard for components and it’s in every browser. This also makes debugging never too overly challenging because of framework abstractions. They are easy to share across teams and applications, and building a design system around web components means that your design system is framework-agnostic. Libraries have made web components very easy to add anywhere and to incorporate into logic systems, e.g. through native JS events. They work seamlessly across React, Vue, Angular, or plain HTML. This ensures long-term maintainability and prevents vendor lock-in ,  unlike framework-specific solutions. Web components are also compatible with micro-frontends and module federation, so clearly they are being considered during development of new technologies. Related to this, I’d like to point out that the ‘staying power’ of a technology is greatly enhanced when the technology is built into a specification required to be adopted by popular modern competitors. Such is the case for web components. This is important because some even speculate that native solutions such as web components could replace all frameworks.

So how have we used web components on my team? Our web components live in a repository dedicated to developing them, testing them, and publishing them. They are published and distributed as NPM packages, making them easy to share and import. Each component comes with a Storybook story that is also imported into a separate design-focused Storybook application, our ‘design lab’, where you can visually browse our inventory and interact with the components. Two application teams have adopted most of their components to be from our design system. Three other teams have adopted some of our web components. A few other teams are evaluating our components. The set of components used, and how, varies between application teams. Most will start with the Side Navigation component, especially because it serves as a visual backbone for our platform application UX. Our Grid System component is useful as it provides spacing alignment for all other components on your web page. Of course, our data grid component is central to the functionality of important data-driven UI pages.

Our design lab application has become a great place to start exploring our component offering. Storybook gives you the tools to display each individual component in an organized way and allows people to not only learn about them but also ‘shop the look’ by changing the controls of the component and playing with the component to see if it makes sense for them. We have also built a demo application in our design lab, showcasing visual integrations of these components. This allows users to see an entire UI built with our components, but this also allows us, under the hood, to test these component integrations. More recently, we have built theme-ing previews into our design lab, allowing users to apply a completely custom theme, and see how it affects the built-in demo application and each individual component separately. This ability is quite important, because our web components are compatible with theme-ing changes, and the design lab allows one to preview these ahead of time before you apply a specific theme in your application.

It probably goes without saying that we have used the web component technology to build all of these components. This means that, no matter what front-end framework you are using, you could bring these components into your application already, and even apply theme-ing through them. Using a common set of components that work anywhere, allows you to build applications faster and with a consistent look and feel. This has huge implications, and web components are the best technology suited to deliver this kind of central, modular approach to building UI elements. We don’t want to be limited by a less-robust technology that serves as a barrier to cross-application modularity.

Thank you for reading!

A new market study,“ Global Security Orchestration Automation and Response  Market Research Report ” has been featured on Market Research Future.

The report on the Global Security Orchestration Automation and Response  Market Research Report provides a bird’s eye view of the current proceeding within the Global Security Orchestration Automation and Response  Market. Further, the report also takes into account the impact of the novel COVID-19 pandemic on the Global Security Orchestration Automation and Response  Market Research Report and offers a clear assessment of the projected market fluctuations during the forecast period.

Market Synopsis

The Global Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) Market is expected to register a CAGR of 14.6% during the forecast period to reach USD 2,027.2 million by 2025.

SOAR is a set of distinct technologies which enables enterprises to gather data and security warnings from various sources. The enterprises perform threat analysis and remediation processes with the help of these software and services together for prioritizing incident response (IR) activities. Using SOAR tools, enterprises can define response procedures and perform threat analysis in a systematic digital workflow format, leading to automation of various machine-driven activities. 

SOAR combines three technology sectors which were previously categorized as security orchestration and automation, threat intelligence and incident response. Since the number of security professionals is scarce, in the years to come, the enterprises are expected to face an increasing shortage of security professionals. 

SOAR fills this gap and as a result, enterprises are likely to adopt these solutions in the coming years. The growing digitization leading to increasing vulnerabilities in data security is a major factor which is responsible to drive the market growth. The need for a complete view to manage cyber threats and the need for improving detection and response activities across verticals are other key factors which are driving the global SOAR market. Furthermore, the lack of awareness regarding SOAR is expected to be a restraint for the growth of this market.

Segmentation

The global SOAR market has been segmented based on component, application, organization size, vertical, and region/country.

By component, the global SOAR market has been divided into platform and services. The services segment has further been divided into professional services and managed services.

By application, the global SOAR market has been divided into security operations center (SOC) optimization, network forensics, threat intelligence, compliance management, and others.

Based on organization size, the global SOAR market has been divided into small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) and large enterprise.

On the basis of vertical, the global SOAR market has been divided into banking, financial services and insurance, IT & telecom, government, energy and utilities, healthcare, retail and others.

The global SOAR market has been analyzed for five regions—North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East & Africa, and South America.

Regional Analysis

The global SOAR market is estimated to register a CAGR of 14.6% over the forecast period. The geographic analysis of the global SOAR market has been conducted for North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East & Africa, and South America.

North America has the largest market share as the companies in this region are investing significantly in R&D activities, which has led to the advancement of technologies in security orchestration and automation. The US leads the market in North America due to high adoption of digital transformation to support large volumes of critical data; as a result, the need for SOAR platform is the highest in the country.

Europe is expected to be the second-largest market during the review period due to the rising need among enterprises across verticals and managed security service providers to comply with the regulations imposed by governments. Asia-Pacific is anticipated to be the fastest-growing market in the global SOAR market during the forecast period. The rise in the adoption of SOAR for security incident and response, security orchestration and automation and threat intelligence are the key drivers for the growth of the market in Asia-Pacific.

Competitive Analysis

The global SOAR market is witnessing high growth due to the rise in demand from various verticals such as BFSI and IT and telecommunications. Major players have opted for partnerships and new product development as their key organic growth strategies to enhance their positions in the market and cater to the demands of end-users across verticals. For instance, in February 2018, Splunk acquired Phantom Cyber, a SOAR platform provider, which led to SOAR being embedded into Splunk’s analytics-driven security solution and is also used for IT operations use cases such as infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring and troubleshooting. In February 2019, Palo Alto Networks acquired Demisto, a company specializing in SOAR. The acquisition is expected to advance Palo Alto Networks’s ability to deliver automated threat prevention and response for security teams. In August 2019, Resolve Systems acquired FixStream, a leading vendor in AIOps. The acquisition will help Resolve Systems to predict, diagnose, and automate the resolution of complex infrastructure and application issues.

Key Players

The key players in the global SOAR market are identified based on their country of origin, presence across different regions, recent key developments, product diversification, and industry expertise. These include Cisco Systems, Inc. (US), IBM Corporation (US), FireEye Inc. (US), Swimlane, LLC (US), Palo Alto Networks (US), Rapid7 (US), Splunk Inc. (US), LogRhythm, Inc. (US), DFLabs (Italy), ThreatConnect (US), Cyberbit (Israel), CyberSponse (US), D3 Security (US), Ayehu Software Technologies Ltd. (US), and Resolve Systems (US). The key strategies adopted by most of the players are partnerships, agreements, and collaborations.

The other players in the global SOAR market include Tufin (Israel), Exabeam (US), Siemplify (US), ATAR Labs (Europe), EclecticIQ (Netherlands) and Security (US).

More Information : https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/security-orchestration-automation-and-response-market-8385

Ionic 4 is the first version of the hybrid mobile application development framework to completely grasp modern Web APIs, for example, Custom Elements, CSS factors, and Shadow DOM. It is significantly to complement that Ionic 4 has continued to be Angular’s leading mobile solution by embracing new Angular features and tooling.