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With the AOE Technology Radar, we regularly share our experiences and insights with current technologies for developing software solutions. For the sixth time, we provide assessments and recommendations which arise from our daily work.
In total, there are 28 changes compared to the previous version.
The following trend topics have emerged for us in the respective areas in recent months:
With C#, another object-oriented, strongly typed programming language offers additional options for our development teams. Two frameworks from the C# ecosystem, Hot Chocolate and SpecFlow, are also new to the radar.
In many cases, we now focus on generalization over specialization, including app development. While native code still offers advantages in particular areas such as performance or platform experience, cross-platform frameworks like Flutter are sufficient for most of our use cases, significantly reducing development effort through a shared codebase and thus enabling the development teams to focus on implementing the customer journey and an outstanding UI/UX.
With Playwright, we also now rely on a cross-platform testing tool in quality assurance.
In more and more areas of the software development lifecycle, programmatically describing configuration, infrastructure, or pipeline steps replaces manual workflows. Another step is implementing security requirements as policy-as-code. Automated compliance checks increase the security of our applications, ensure consistent configuration across environments, and simplify auditability.
Originally developed as a pure interface between applications, APIs can now be much more – right up to the basis of the entire software development strategy. They are also, for example, an integral part of the TM Forum-developed Open Digital Architecture (ODA).
APIs also represent a central component in many of our applications. With GraphQL, the API query language that we have already used successfully several times reaches the "adopt" status. In addition, Apache APISIX, an API gateway, is being tested as part of a project (quadrant "Tools").
While Ansible has been on the market for over 10 years, it is a newcomer for AOE in this release. It complements our toolchain in the area of infrastructure-as-code and is used in smaller projects for the orchestration of OCI containers on virtual machines (VMs), where the use of a Kubernetes cluster would cause disproportionate overhead.
Also of note is the migration of single sign-on (SSO) within the AOE group to OpenID Connect in conjunction with Keycloak. In conjunction with the introduction of additional security features such as multi-factor authentication, this contributes to a significant increase in information security. The previously used authentication via LDAP Login is no longer recommended and is accordingly put on "hold."
With the increasing internal use of the monorepo approach, Turborepo is being used for the first time, which promises to simplify the handling of large repositories.
In addition, we evaluate the use of the package manager pnpm in a project, which, among other things, offers resource-saving dependency management in frontend development.
