Upgrading your legacy business software
Why upgrade your legacy business software?
The technology industry moves at an extremely fast pace and you must keep up if you want to be successful. Legacy software is software that is no longer supported, has known security vulnerabilities and does not allow for future growth. This means you can’t take advantage of new features or have any guarantee that your security vulnerabilities will be fixed.
If you don’t update your business tools, you will quickly fall behind the competition and be out of business.
Luckily, there are still ways to upgrade legacy software without having to throw it away and start over (at least in most cases).Sometimes, when a new technology emerges, existing systems can’t handle it. In this case, the legacy system needs to be upgraded. Many modern languages and frameworks have emerged to allow you to make this transition in a safe and easy manner. Some of them include:
JavaScript
jQuery is a framework built on JavaScript that allows for quick prototyping. It has a large community behind it and uses an “it just works” philosophy. This means that bugs are rare and usually fixed quickly from version to version. Also, because the community is growing larger every day, there are more developers finding bugs faster than ever before. jQuery also promotes best practice technologies such as JSON data storage which means that you don’t have to put raw data in your HTML.
AngularJS is a MVC framework for front-end development built by Google. It comes with lots of design patterns out of the box so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you build something new. This means faster development time which saves money over the long run (and lets you deliver features faster). Also, because it’s recently been acquired by Google there are now hundreds of employees working on this project full-time. If anyone can make browsers work well with these types of frameworks, it’s them!
C#/.NET
This is Microsoft’s answer to all these modern languages and frameworks. .NET has many code libraries available that allow you to program rich interfaces and extremely powerful backends extremely quickly. It requires the Windows operating system, however (you cannot use macOS or Linux to build .NET apps at this time). It also doesn’t support as many front-end languages as some of these other frameworks so you may need to hire more people if your team does not already know C#.
Objective-C / Swift for iOS
Objective-C and Swift are both object oriented programming languages built by Apple for creating applications on their operating systems: iOS and MacOS. They handle multi-threading better than traditional languages such as Java which means that your application will be able to perform more operations simultaneously giving them a faster feel. They also let you access all the hardware within the device such as the GPS, Camera, Accelerometer, etc. which means that you can build an extremely compelling experience for users within your app.
SQL / MySQL
While not technically a programming language or framework, SQL is probably the most popular data storage technology on the market. It offers loads of flexibility by allowing multiple different ways to query the same database of information. If you’re looking to store large amounts of structured data (and nearly every business does) then this will be your first stop since it’s supported across multiple platforms and devices. Also, there are many active open source projects that allow you to write applications on top of these databases without running into vendor lock-in issues later down the line.
Security
You may also need to upgrade some legacy applications due to security reasons. Sometimes new technologies are created with safety in mind which means that they can do things more safely than older frameworks/languages. If you have any mission critical systems then it might be worth your while to check them out and see if you can provide some additional protection for your users.
For more information about transitioning your legacy business software, please contact York Apps.