7 Developer Tools Anyone Can Use to Build Modern Enterprise Apps

From Ruby to JavaScript, there are numerous languages and DevOps tools available to help build that latest, modern-day, enterprise-grade app.

One of RedMonk’s most popular programming languages, Ruby is a general-purpose language that has been widely used for over 20 years. Often used in Web programming, Ruby’s popularity stems from its ability to shrink the development process and provide access to a wide range of third-party libraries. Everyone from new developers to the largest enterprises use Ruby. To connect Weather Mash to the Open Weather Map, Flickr and Wikipedia APIs, Chase wrote in Ruby with a Sinatra framework.

Apcera Community Edition has 90 percent of the functionality of Apcera’s enterprise cloud platform, can be run on a laptop and is free. To manage Weather Mash, Chase used Apcera CE. Each component of Weather Mash is built as a stand-alone static site running in its own container on Apcera CE. With Apcera, Chase could choose containers or more traditional app dev tools. If failures occur, Apcera CE can restart that component without Chase needing to intervene.

JavaScript is one of the most well-known programming languages as it is as ubiquitous as the beverage it shares a name with. It combines HTML and CSS to make up the core Web technologies that are used to create Websites and content. Almost every Website on the Internet uses JavaScript to improve the visitor experience. App developers can use JavaScript for everything from building user interfaces to coding rudimentary video games; it can make an application more interactive. It is one of the languages Chase used for his Weather Mash app.

Bootstrap can be used as a template when building applications. It makes traditionally cumbersome CSS easier to use and better for mobile development. Bootstrap is the difference between painting a house by hand or using a spray can; however, it has a more limited set of options than CSS—so while your house is painted faster, you only have 10 colors to choose from. With this tool, you can make things look attractive quickly, which is exactly why Chase used it when developing Weather Mash.

Vue.js is a lightweight JavaScript framework. Like a skeleton for your code, the control flow is built into Vue.js and there are a predefined set of holes within it to fill with your code. The framework does the heavy lifting so you can focus on any customization and more creative decisions. Chase selected this framework to make his single-page app more dynamic so he could create a reactive Web interface using reactive components without the help of a UX designer.

Coders love Python. It is easy to read, promoting the creation of code that anyone can understand and contribute to. As a general-purpose language, Python is a natural choice for beginners and experts alike. For all his communications with Raspberry Pi—a tiny computer for beginner app developers that Weather Mash ran on—Chase wrote his code in Python.

At the most basic level, every app needs a place in which to store data; Chase knew this when setting out to build Weather Mash. And NoSQL database Redis was an easy choice for his application development. Redis is a fast in-memory and persistent datastore. It is powerful because it can store complex data types, like sorted sets. It can also be used as a cache or database.