The GrapeCity’s Documents API product line provides low-footprint APIs for Excel, Word, PDF, Imaging and JavaScript PDF viewer. The latest version includes enhancements for GrapeCity Documents for PDF, PDF Viewer, Documents for Word, Imaging and Excel. 

GrapeCity Documents for Excel (GcExcel) also now offers more features for SpreadJS integration, such as support for RangeTemplate cell types. 

In addition, the Documents update features a new Signature tool that helps end users add graphical signatures to PDF documents. It also includes updates to the existing .NET Excel Library and API toolkit. Additional details for the GrapeCity Documents v.4.1 are available here.

“In this release, we focus on strengthening our existing feature set and performance metrics and providing full support of features requested and in much demand,” said Shilpa Sharma, the product manager of GrapeCity. 

GrapeCity’s other recent release, ActiveReportsJS v2.1, improves the product experience for developers, report authors and end users with significant enhancements to the standalone report designers and the end-user designer components. ActiveReports is designed to provide code-based cross-platform reporting.

According to the company, the end-user design component no longer depends on bootstrap styles and won’t conflict with an application’s CSS. Expression Syntax now makes it easy to read and write dynamic report content and the updates Tablix Wizard lets developers instantly create pivot table reports.

The new ActiveReports release also upgrades JavaScript developers’ design toolkit for intuitive and dynamic reports. 

The newly added Rich Text Report allows developers to display static or dynamic mixed-format text in reports. It can create mail-merge reports, labels or display preformatted content from a data source. 

ActiveReportsJS v2.1 also comes with new tutorials such as a revised Report Author Guide for learning fundamental concepts and the Standalone Report Designer tutorial so that developers can better understand a report author’s primary tool. 

Additional details on all of the enhancements to ActiveReportsJS v2.1 are available here.

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Previously, developers using languages other than C and C++ had to use wrappers or bindings in order to access these APIs, which increases the chances of an error and doesn’t scale to broad API coverage, according to Microsoft. 

This has prompted several community projects to try to provide a more strongly typed and idiomatic representation of those wrappers and bindings to provide an improved developer experience such as PInvoke for .NET and winapi-rs for Rust.

However, since these projects are all manually maintained, the Windows SDK team said it started its own version to take some of the burden off of the community.

“The goal of the win32metadata project is to provide a complete description of the Win32 API surface in metadata so that it can be projected to any language in an automated way, improving correctness and minimizing maintenance overhead,” the Windows SDK team wrote in a blog post.

The project is an ECMA-335 compliant Windows metadata file (winmd) that was published to NuGet.org.

The first such language projection is C#/Win32,which parses the metadata and generates P/Invoke wrappers that are required to call APIs. Developers just have to add a reference to the Microsoft.Windows.CsWin32 package from NuGet.org and add the file NativeMethods.txt to the root of their project with a list of the Win32 functions that they want to call. 

“C#/Win32 provides rich Intellisense, strong types for parameters, and also includes the relevant documentation from docs.microsoft.com, all dynamically generated from metadata based on the APIs you request,” the Windows team explained. “No additional dependencies are required, broad API coverage is achieved with improved correctness and minimal maintenance overhead, and the APIs are expressed idiomatically as C# developers would expect.”

Meanwhile, the Rust language projection follows the C++/WinRT of building language projections for Windows and the windows crate lets developers call APIs just like they do for any other Rust module. 

The team is also working on adding the Modern C++ projection on GitHub and welcoming community contributions there. Other languages will follow base on popular demand. 

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Financial services is a good example of an industry dominated by long-established firms with traditional technology at the core. Even if there is a desire to evolve systems, the process to rip and replace can be both cumbersome and costly. Technology also only gets firms as far as the potential of an idea. 

Ideas are potential solutions, and solutions are business drivers. The key problem for firms today, however, is that technology is typically prioritized over innovation, which puts the cart before the horse. Two complementary factors are beginning to change this mindset: the advent of business-oriented APIs and an increasing culture of collaboration. 

Changing the game with APIs
Creating a system once involved a full stack developer starting from scratch with a software development kit. They would sit close to the code and would add to the source every time a new function or feature was required. With the arrival of the world of web services, there was a decoupling of sorts. WSDL was a way to expose a desired object, but in a web service. Instead of accessing C++, C#, or COBOL, it was possible to access an XML representation of the object, so it was still tightly coupled to the engineering, but the communication could be decoupled.

APIs allow a standard of communication that is not coupled to the object code and is more related to the business logic. I’ll describe the difference using a finance example: before APIs, a request might be ‘Get card ID’, for which there is object code. With an API the request is ‘I want to know all my current cards.’ Essentially, the request is the same, but instead of seeing it from an engineering perspective, it is now viewed from a business one. APIs that are business-oriented completely changed the game and are now arguably the most valuable technology software providers have in their arsenal. 

Making technology address the business problem
For traditional firms, innovation must be decoupled from core systems so that solutions can be delivered at pace and in an agile way. Fintech is the answer to this problem for the financial services industry, but there are similar “techs” in other industries, such as regtech and healthtech. While some firms fall into the challenger camp, many now seek collaboration with established firms. 

The challenge for today’s organizations is to address the immediate demands of customers in the digital age. It is here that collaboration with agile tech partners is a must. 

These agile firms arose in the digital age and were built with service-oriented architecture (SOA) and APIs. Together, these two innovations enable continuous delivery, meaning the building and deployment of solutions happens concurrently and can easily be reversed to reduce overall risk. Further to this, the push toward continuous delivery and APIs brought about microservices, which enable a further decoupling where every feature and application can be delivered and upgraded independently. 

Netflix is a good example of how to deploy microservices well. Every feature – from authentication to subscription management – is delivered as a microservice, but the core service comes from the same place. This is the way firms can scale and innovate, without risk to the core offering. Netflix was built with modern technology and architectural modularity, so there was no requirement for decoupling. Organizations without this privilege must bring in innovation from the outside, which is where collaboration becomes essential. 

No innovation without collaboration
Identifying the opportunities for new solutions at pace requires drawing on multiple disciplines and expertise across an organization. Siloed teams focusing on their own areas of business with little collaboration and communication between departments makes this difficult. Banks are now seeing the benefits of not only working with more agile software providers or fintechs from a business outcome perspective, but also the benefits of a more diverse, cross-functional culture.  

Take core banking offerings as an example. Banks operate across a number of markets, such as loans and payments, which are increasingly under threat from challengers. They need to innovate and bring compelling solutions to market quickly to stay competitive. Older technology systems and sometimes culture can hinder rapid development. Collaborating with a technology partner that can plug into core systems via APIs and develop solutions can help overcome these challenges. Furthermore, a fintech that takes a holistic view of a customer’s offerings is able to identify opportunities more readily. For example, a statistical model developed in a payments context may turn out to be ineffective, but applying the same model to loan data may create a viable use case. Without a cross-functional team to identify this possibility, the opportunity to pivot and innovate would go undiscovered. 

Legacy systems often boast enormous power, stability and scale, and still underpin much of the financial services world. Opening them up to a world of innovation via APIs and collaboration unlocks their potential in today’s digital-first era.

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With the explosion of APIs that now are used for data and document exchange, some companies are finding that their EDI solutions are coming up short, lacking the ability to leverage those APIs.

“Historically, EDI … is a way to send purchase orders and invoices electronically between companies,” explained Mike Albritton, managing director at ArcESB, a CData company specializing in modernizing B2B connectivity. “Companies would use flat files, CSV and lots of different ways to get information into the back-end system. Today, everything is API-driven. Today, you’ve got your ERP system in the cloud with an API, your shipping system has an API, your warehouse system has an API. And, while EDI is still a big part of the process, you’ve still got to integrate with APIs. That’s where we’ve tried to fit in and make it easy for customers to do.”

ArcESB is the latest iteration of RSSBus, a B2B integration solution for Managed File Transfer and EDI launched in 2006 and renamed in September 2019. “The name RSSBus is rooted in the early days of Web 2.0 and was based on the simple pub-sub messaging that drives the platform.” Albritton said. “We’ve added a lot of capabilities since those days and ultimately the product outgrew its brand. ArcESB is still designed around simple integration and loose coupling, but now includes more of the features of a modern low-code service bus, including modern drag & drop integration and an agile microservices design. We’ve leveraged the CData team and all the connectors they’re building, really to provide a solution that’s very much a message-driven workflow solution that takes data from one place — whether a business partner or trading partner — and transform that to push it into your back-end system.”

Many companies today use SaaS applications to manage their accounting and ERP systems, he said. These SaaS applications expose APIs, Webhooks and the like. to integrate B2B processes with them, so those companies need an EDI platform that is capable of integrating their EDI processes into those systems.  “Modern EDI software must leverage APIs to integrate with all of their business systems,” he said.

For many small- and medium-size businesses without an EDI process in place, adopting APIs to exchange data is an easier, more agile solution. With APIs, there are no virtual area networks, no document transaction fees and no portals to deal with, Albritton explained. 

A couple of use cases shine light on what ArcESB provides. For companies with EDI solutions that find themselves needing to leverage APIs — which many EDi solutions do not do — they have to do a lot of custom coding, which falls to developers with particular expertise. ArcESB offers a drag-and-drop, visual interface that enables other members of the team to create the integrations. 

Another case is when companies are looking to sell products in e-commerce platforms such as Shopify or Amazon Marketplace, which use APIS and don’t have an EDI process for that in some places. Albritton said, “And so, they came to us and said, ‘Look, our EDI provider doesn’t have any kind integration with APIs,’ and that’s where we were easily able to take the EDI process they had and convert that to integrate with other APIs from e-commerce tools.”

ArcESB is a modern spin on the enterprise service bus, an architecture for busing messages from one place to another. “ESB traditionally is a big heavyweight application; you need an army of people to install it and set it up,” Albritton said. “Ours is a very lightweight, easy to use, drag-and-drop interface, browser-based interface, where you can do this easily. 

The company recently released a form connector with which you can dynamically build a custom form that kicks off messages and workflows. 

ArcESB is an on-premises solution, but it does have instances of it running in the Microsoft Azure and AWS marketplaces as preconfigured VMs. “It’s an application you can run anywhere,” he said. “That differentiates us from a lot of the iPaaS solutions; your data is all in their cloud and you don’t have control of that, whereas with us, you do.”

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“As crucial of an industry as it is for both consumers and businesses, there hasn’t been significant software-driven disruption in the world of direct mail, and the industry still largely functions the way it has been for decades. This is especially true when it comes to the handling of mail data and the act of preparing the mail, where outdated, laggard processes like FTP are still being utilized. As a result, companies are left without a way to send mail quickly, personalize content, or effectively track and measure their mail,” Harry Zhang, co-founder of Lob, a direct mail automation and address verification provider. 

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“Snail mail” is still a strategic component of businesses looking to contact and connect with potential customers through multiple outlets. Because of its lack of innovation, Zhang explained mail campaigns can take months to launch. Beyond just marketing campaigns, the transactional communications such as bills, invoices and account statements also face long lead times, inefficient production and limited visibility. 

“So, why does it take so long? The answer is twofold: One, printing and sending a large volume of mail is inherently a complex task. There is a lot of work and coordination involved with developing creative, acquiring and validating data, and physically printing millions of pieces of mail. But also two, the process that companies use to produce mail at scale hasn’t changed in years. The result: companies are operating a complex workflow using antiquated and very manual processes,” Zhang explained. 

Zhang’s company Lob is working on speeding up and enhancing “snail mail” campaigns through the use of APIs. “By making mail programmatic in real-time, APIs power an entirely new way of sending commercial mail—transforming what has been a slow, manual, and difficult channel into a modern communication tool with the same dexterity as digital channels. This unlocks mail for a wide range of data-driven use cases from customer acquisition, to transactions, to retention and advocacy while saving companies time and money,” he said. 

For instance, APIs can be used to determine when customers should receive mail and what type of mail they should receive, if the mail is arriving on time and to the right address, and [then to] integrate it into existing digital systems and marketing tools. APIs can also transform mail campaigns into an automated service, and link to the U.S. Postal Service so businesses can keep track of what’s being sent.

“The impact of developing for the offline world like direct mail is often underappreciated, but with the rise of technologies like AI and machine learning, the opportunities for more interconnected businesses are being exposed everywhere. APIs represent the chance to connect all these disparate workflows, and developers and engineers who can think disruptively are valuable in creating these connections,” said Zhang. 

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This is worrisome because in order for APIs to drive businesses forward, they need to be properly maintained and managed, according to Randy Heffner, an analyst at the research firm Forrester. “By opening access to digital business capabilities, APIs drive agility to optimize customer experiences, create dynamic digital ecosystems, achieve operational excellence, and build platform business models,” he wrote in the Forrester Wave: API Management Solutions, Q3 2020.

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But businesses need a formal way to create, secure, manage, and optimize APIs at scale, in addition to making sure all stakeholders have access to the tools and information necessary to do their jobs. 

What is stopping organizations from adopting an API management solution is a misunderstanding of what it can do for the business. According to Heffner, organizations sometimes look at API management solutions as something that can help people sign up or adopt their APIs as well as just something that provides security for their APIs. “It isn’t less than that, but it is much more than that,” he said. “The first way to think about an API management solution is as a business application for managing relationships between API users and API providers. It’s much more than just this technical thing to help people subscribe to APIs.”

He explained that an API management solution is crucial when your API users are organizations. An organization can be doing 12 different things with your API with 12 different teams, so there needs to be a way to manage identities and access, and a way to let users leverage documentation and testing processes. 

“APIs can be used in so many different ways. You have to put context around them before you can say how they add value,” said Heffner. “What’s the ROI of APIs? That’s like asking what’s the ROI of nuts and bolts.” 

As organizations start to realize the important of API management solutions and as vendors start to invest in more features to meet the needs of cloud-native, modern architectures, Heffner sees a few trends taking the space to the next level.

Beyond REST
API management solutions are starting to move beyond REST. According to Heffner, REST was and still is a popular API format because it is supported across the entire web/Internet landscape, but at the root of REST it is just a “request-reply type of message exchange pattern,” and today’s solutions are event-based, data-oriented and include exchange patterns. Forrester refers to this as digital bonding, which encompasses a broader array of interaction models. For instance, webhooks, SOAP and GraphQL are becoming top architectural style choices. “We are seeing more openness to a broader way of thinking about what the scope of an API management solution should be just from a technology point of view,” said Heffner. 

Vendors are starting to put more investment into the way their developer portals are provided with better ability to manage APIs, have different teams use APIs and provide life cycle management. Heffner sometimes sees users having to go off and build their own portals or solutions because tool providers aren’t providing enough. In the State of API report, it found that 16% were using an API management tool built in-house. Vendors are now trying to figure out how to provide a portal that includes configurability options and let users go a good distance with it. 

And lastly, there is a bigger push to understand how microservices and APIs work together. Heffner noted that organizations usually define and treat microservices and APIs as the same thing, but microservices are a deployment approach while APIs are an access approach. The two go together, but they are different things. The State of API Report found that 65% of respondents believe microservices will drive the most API growth over the next couple of years. As service meshes become more popular and advanced, vendors will need to figure out how to include microservices, containers, and service mesh environments as different options and architectures. 

What to look for in an API management tool
According to Heffner, users should align their API management solution with their API strategy. For instance, do they need richer features and more coverage, or a simple strategy with a high level of customization?

The higher-end solutions will provide a breadth of capabilities and features, but organizations might find that a lower-end solution works better because it gives them basic capabilities they need and don’t have to build from the ground up, but also allows them to add in their own custom features. 

Other considerations when looking at an API management solution include how it supports governance and API user engagement needs, and if it supports a cohesive API design process. 

“The central role of an API management solution is to manage relationships between API providers and API users, whether inside or across enterprise boundaries. APIs have widely varying use cases, governance styles, business models, and delivery processes, resulting in a wide array of breadth and depth in API management solution feature-function,” Heffner wrote in the Forrester Wave on API Management solutions. 

The most popular features offered by API management vendors include:

A developer portal: which allows developers to discover, explore, purchase and test APIs as well as supports developer onboarding and collaboration 

API gateways: to secure and manage the traffic between clients and back ends or between APIs and developers, customers, partners or employees

API catalog: that gives users a full view of their API landscape including which assets are available and ready for reuse. An API catalog also can help users view dependencies and analyze changes.

API life cycle management: where developers can design, develop, publish, deploy and version APIs

API policy and security: such as encryption, schema validation, signatures, threat protection, and PII protection

Monetization: capabilities that allow users to package, price and publish APIs for others to access

Analytics: that allow all stakeholders in an organization to view and manage all aspects of their APIs and API programs

How organizations are using APIs to take their business to the next level
After seeing success with its global API partners, the local, national and global weather forecast provider AccuWeather decided it wanted to branch out to new customers — individual developers. In order to do this, the organization needed to tailor its offering to meet the range of needs from developers and monetize those needs. According to the company, an API management solution was able to offer different levels of API offerings; provide flexible billing for API usage; provide a self-service portal for developers to develop; purchase or build APIs; and gain analytics that helped its team understand traffic patterns and how users view weather data. 

“A single developer always has the potential to be working on the next big thing and become our next big enterprise partner. We needed a way to reach them,” said Mark Iannelli, senior technical account manager at AccuWeather.

Within two months of launching its developer portal, the company says it saw more than 6,500 new users sign up; about 2,500 users that created API keys; and 60 users that purchased one of its API packages. 

Beachbody is a home exercise and dietary supplement provider that needed new ways to increase its speed and agility as well as manage its over 400 enterprise APIs. 

“The digital transformation initiative at Beachbody is about consolidating and creating one common platform that can meet the needs of our direct response business, supplement line, our digital customers as well as our coaches,” said Michael Lee, vice president of engineering at Beachbody. “We see thousands of API transactions per day either from the ecommerce pieces, from our content API to our ecommerce API to registration and identity validation.”

After rearchitecting its platform, the company realized that it couldn’t handle its API traffic alone and turned to API management solutions to help internal and external developers create APIs and secure development. Through API gateways, Lee said they were able to address developer concerns and move them into a more central location. Additionally, the API management solution’s portal was able to provide the security, documentation and presentation layer necessary to be successful. “All of these things help us build a lively, evergreen API ecosystem that is going to be easy to consume for both external and internal developers at Beachbody,” said Lee.

PermataBank, a leading Indonesia bank, began a digital and IT modernization transformation three years ago in order to catch up to competitors in the digital banking space and meet the demands of its customers who expected faster and better technology solutions. Previously, PermataBank was made up of legacy systems in dire need of an overhaul. To modernize and re-architect its platform, the bank focused on digital self-service channels and was able to expose products and services to partners outside the bank through the use of APIs. 

According to the bank, with the help of APIs, it was able to increase its account acquisition by 375%, and saw a 275% CAGR growth in transaction volume.

With the use of APIs, the bank also has been able to implement mobile banking, roll out digital capabilities, and use APIs to power new products and services. As a result, it has entered new markets, extended its customer based and increased the size of its transactions. 

“APIs are becoming a core part of our business now because the digital economy is progressing well in Indonesia. We have more than 1,000 partners using our services already, and have 150 APIs published that anyone can use, but we are just getting started,” said Abdy Salimin, CIO and director of technology and operations for PermataBank.  “There are a lot more services in the area of supply chain, payments, transfer, loans origination, account opening, and wealth management we can offer, and next we will be moving into a lot more corporate account services and more back-office APIs that will complement our internet banking services. Everyone across the bank now sees the potential and understands the change to our business models. We can move faster with this different perspective.”

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The company focuses on the OpenAPI specification because it provides an open standard to define and document APIs. However, the company found that this often takes a lot of time and effort to keep the documentation and API up-to-date. “Often, the OpenAPI spec ends up a large, forgotten, thousand-line file,” Nicholas Bourdakos, an IBM developer advocate, wrote in a post. 

The OpenAPI Comment Parser is meant to address this by enabling developers to comment inline with their code. “When the OpenAPI spec lives inside the code, developers are much more likely to keep it up-to-date as their code changes,” Bourdakos wrote. 

This will also break code down into smaller and more manageable pieces, Bourdakos explained. 

In addition, IBM is releasing a new specification format for comments, which reduces the amount of specification needed by 50%. 

Bourdakos added: “The Comment Parser automatically creates better documentation with less code that is more manageable. On top of these improvements, developers writing the API can use the documentation generated from the Comment Parser to test their API. This means less time waiting for a frontend to be built or having to rely on other tools in order to test drive their API.”

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The OpenAPI specification is a standard for describing the interface of HTTP APIs, allowing both humans and machines to understand what an API does without having to read the documentation or have knowledge of the implementation, GitHub explained.

The description contains over 600 operations that are exposed in GitHub’s API. The description can be used to generate mock servers, test suites, and bindings for languages that aren’t supported by Octokit, which is a collection of official clients for the API.

It is currently provided in two formats: bundled and dereferenced. The bundled version of the description is the preferred one because it uses OpenAPI components for reuse and readability. The dereferenced version is intended only for tooling that has poor support for inline references to components, GitHub explained.

The description is currently in beta. The company plans on doing quarterly releases of it for GitHub Enterprise Server and GitHub Private Instances, and more frequent updates for GitHub.com.

“We expect to make the description even more complete and accurate as we go forward and as OpenAPI becomes central to our developer experience — internally and externally,” Marc-Andre Giroux, senior platform engineer at GitHub, wrote in a post. 

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Traditionally, when front ends are coupled with the back end, developers have to be full-stack experts and be able to build a full-stack solution, according to Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a web development solution provider. “In some ways what was happening was you weren’t getting your cake and eating it too because the back end wasn’t strong enough and the front end was quite limited,” said Rauch.

Further, a website that required a web server constantly running to deliver a program often led to site lag times, and left the system more open for attack, according to Matt Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify, a modern web development platform provider. 

This development conundrum is now being addressed with a new rising development and architectural approach called Jamstack, which comes with the promise of providing faster, more accessible, more maintainable and globally available websites and applications.  

Jamstack stands for JavaScript, API, and Markup. The term was created by Netlify in 2015, but has recently been gaining more traction. “We coined the term ‘Jamstack’ in 2015 to better define what developers were already starting to do – decouple the front- and back-end web and apps, focus on best practices of speed and availability, and redefine their workflows,” Biilmann explained. 

According to Biilmann, as organizations have moved away from monolithic architectures to microservices, there has been a natural separation between the front end and the back end, enabling developers to focus on building that front-end layer and owning the whole life cycle around it. 

“As the web has progressed and the demands on the experiences we are building and the devices we are reaching have gone up, we have had to build layers of abstractions that take some of the complexity away and makes it possible for a developer to work without considering those lower layers of the stack. That has been one of the driving forces behind the idea of the Jamstack,” Biilmann said in a keynote at this year’s Jamstack Conference.

Jamstack leverages pre-rendering to help developers build faster websites, aims to provide a more secure infrastructure with fewer points of attack, is able to scale through global delivery, and speed up the development and deployment cycle.

“This idea is that the stack has moved up a little. We have transcended from thinking about the stack in terms of the specific programming language we use on the server, from the web server we run on, or from the specific database and instead [we are] thinking at the layer of what gets delivered to the end users in terms of pre-built markup, in terms of the JavaScript that runs directly in the browser, and in terms of these APIs we have access to. By doing this, we are able to let developers focus on building websites instead of focusing on infrastructure and we are able to make the performance part of the platform itself instead of making it something that developers have to have,” Biilmann said. 

The rise of mobile has also contributed to the rise of Jamstack. “We saw the web reimagined for mobile apps. If you think about Spotify, no one thinks they should be downloading it every time they use it and at the same time no one thinks that they would be downloading all the music in the world on their phone either. There would be no room. You download the app, but you speak to a service to stream the music. That was what we saw the web would need in order to be viable and fight back,” Chris Bach, president and co-founder of Netlify, said.

While the Jamstack is not focused on specific technologies, it does provide a “prescription” for building web applications. Any project that tightly couples the client side with servers is not considered Jamstack. Some examples of this would be a site built with server-side CMS, a single-page app with isomorphic rendering, and a monolithic server-run web app relying on a back-end language. 

“It is almost saying abide by this protocol and you are going to build a great website or a great application,” Vercel’s Rauch said. 

Those protocols include:

1. Decoupling from the back end to allow the front end to be freely deployed globally, directly to a CDN
2. Prebuilding pages into static pages and assets
3. Leveraging APIs to take to back-end services

Often, a misunderstanding is that the static pages Jamstack delivers are flat and boring, but Vercel’s Rauch explained since you pre-render the page and attach JavaScript to it, when the visitor visits the page, JavaScript gets executed and the page comes to life. 

“I tend to compare the Jamstack to the printing press,” Rauch explained. “The main idea is that you pre-render pages and then you distribute them throughout a global CDN, meaning you only do the computation once. When you think about printing your page and then being able to very cheaply and quickly duplicate it throughout the entire world, the server costs go down because you did the work of printing the page once and were able to clone it all over the world. That also means you can clone it right where the visitor is.” 

Rauch continued, “Front end is the largest place for reinvention for companies. A lot of investment has gone into back-end technology and boring infrastructure, low-level technologies. What we noticed is there has been an under-investment or under-appreciation of the technology that is actually closer to the customer.” 

Netlify’s Biilmann believes just as LAMP stack, (Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL, and PHP) is no longer used as a term to create websites and web applications, Jamstack will eventually just become the way of doing things and won’t need to be referred to as the Jamstack anymore. 

“The Jamstack is going to succeed in a way where in a number of years we will stop calling it Jamstack because it will just be the way websites are built,” he said. 

Jamstack defined
Jamstack is a front-end development approach for modern web development.  “Jamstack was born of the stubborn conviction that there was a better way to build for the web. Around 2014, developers started to envision a new architecture that could make web apps look a lot more like mobile apps: built in advance, distributed, and connected directly to powerful APIs and microservices. It would take full advantage of modern build tools, Git workflows, new front-end frameworks, and the shift from monolithic apps towards decoupled front ends and back ends,” Matt Biilmann, CEO of Netlify, wrote in an ebook about Jamstack. 

The ‘J-A-M’ in Jamstack stands for:

JavaScript: Going beyond just the programming language, the Jamstack leverages JavaScript’s advanced constructs, object syntax, variations and compilers. In addition to JavaScript, Jamstack solutions can be built with PHP, Ruby, Python and other languages. According to Netlify, it’s not about a collection of specific software and technologies, rather it is a set of best practices. 

APIs: These enable the front end to be separated from the back end, allowing for more modular development and the ability to leverage third-party tools.

Markup: Prebuilt markup enables websites to be delivered as static HTML files, which provides faster performance. 

According to Netlify, some best Jamstack practices are: 

• Service the entire project directly from a CDN
• Put everything into Git to reduce contributor friction and simplify staging and testing workflows
• Take advantage of modern build tools such as Babel, PostCSS, and Webpack
• Automate builds using webhooks or a publishing platform
• Use atomic deploys to hold live changes until all changed files are uploaded
• Ensure your CDN can handle instant cache invalidation so you know “when a deploy went live, it really went live.”

Jamstack vs serverless
It is common for developers to get Jamstack and serverless mixed up because Jamstack is a subset of serverless. Since Jamstack focuses on front-end development that is decoupled from the back end, it doesn’t require or depend on a server. 

“With the Jamstack, complex, monolithic applications could now be disassembled into small, independent components that are easier to parse and understand. The introduction of serverless and the emergence of the API further cemented the Jamstack as the perfect paradigm for building streamlined, and lightweight applications that scaled efficiently,” Divya Tagtachian, developer advocate at Netlify, wrote in a post.

According to Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a web development solution provider, serverless is just such a vague term, while the Jamstack is more prescriptive. 

“With Jamstack, it tells you to pre-render markup, use JavaScript on the client side and query an API. If I tell you to build a website using serverless, you would look at me like ‘what are you talking about?’ When it comes down to building an application, I like to tell people how to actually do it, so I am a big fan of betting on Jamstack,” he explained.

Colby Fayock, a front-end engineer and UX designer, added that while Jamstack and serverless do have many similarities and philosophies, not all Jamstack apps are always going to be a serverless app. 

“Consider an app hosted in static storage on the cloud provider of your choice. Yes, you might be serving the app in a serverless way, but you might be dealing with an API that utilizes WordPress or Rails, both of which are certainly not serverless,” Fayock wrote in a post. “Combining these philosophies can go a long way, but they shouldn’t be confused as the same.”

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“At Apple, integrating hardware and software is fundamental to everything we do…and silicon is at the heart of our hardware,” Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, said. “So having a world-class silicon design team is a game changer.”

To smooth the transition from Mac infrastructure, Apple introduced Rosetta 2 to run Intel-compatible apps on the new Apple silicone, and Xcode will contain the tools developers need for the transition.

Macs will join iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches in having custom-made chipsets. With the new Apple processors, the company claims that Mac computers will be able to achieve higher performance while consuming low power. 

Developers can apply to get a Developer Transition Kit, which is a Mac Mini that is powered by the A12Z processor paired with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD storage, and units will start shipping next week.

Microsoft and Adobe already plan to bring their flagship softwares to the new ARM-based computers. 

New virtualization capabilities make it easier to run environments such as Linux on Mac and iPhone and iPad apps are also now available on Macs. 

In addition, Apple unveiled its updated operating system macOS Big Sur with updates to its iOS porting tool Mac Catalyst. The developer beta is out this week.

The updated Extensions API includes more granular controls over how long users are granted privileges on a Safari site last on Safari, similar to how app permissions work on iOS. 

When it comes to security this year, Apple focused on data minimization and on-device intelligence. 

“Privacy matters now more than ever, and because our devices contain our most sensitive information, all of our product work is grounded in a set of privacy principles,” said Craig Federighi, the senior vice president of software engineering at Apple. 

First of these principles is data minimization, which uses technologies and techniques to minimize the personal data users or anyone else can access. Second is on-device intelligence to avoid data collection by processing as much information on-device as possible rather than sending it to a server. Third, Apple added extra security protections. The company also stressed the importance of security protections and transparency and control. 

This year, customers can use ‘Sign in to Apple’ with already existing accounts on apps.

Users can also opt for apps to use their approximate location rather than their exact locations. If an app uses the microphone or camera, it will be indicated in the status bar. App Store policy will require apps to ask the user before tracking them across apps and websites owned by other companies. 

Applications now have to be more accountable with how they use their customer’s data. Developers will have to show if they’re tracking users at any time and need to self-report the app’s tracking practices – information which will be available for customers on the App Store. 

Users will be able to see how much data an app is collecting on them and whether the data is used to track them.

Apple also announced new capabilities for its device softwares that developers can utilize to create new apps. 

The company announced that it is working on a smart home interoperability standard with Amazon and Google and that it open-sourced HomeKit, the software framework that enables users to control smart-home applications through a simple voice command to Siri  or through the Home app. 

Meanwhile, iOS 14 will offer new capabilities such as the addition of a Translation app for live conversational translations through Siri, App Clips, which are quickly reachable instances of an app for immediate use and are less than 10MB in size, and updates to CarPlay. 

With the new iPadOS 14 update, Apple has improved the Apple Pencil by adding features like scribble, improved handwriting recognition, smart selection, scratch to delete, copy as text and better cut-paste options. It also brings all of the major features that have come to iOS 14. 

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