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The Software House is recognized by Clutch as the most highly-recommended software development company in Poland in 2020. We help technology-first companies to scale up by providing them with agile software development teams that help to level up their digital processes and transform technology to value faster. On top of high-quality teams, we provide a proven process based on Scrum to ensure Agile but controllable results. Our proposal is a perfect solution whenever your organization wants to: - innovate through software, - build digital products that win users’ hearts, - bring unique value to your customers, - create scalable solutions that adapt to ever-changing business goals, - speed up development and release cycles, - escape local wars for talents, and advantage from distributed teams, - work with highest-rated Javascript, Cloud and PHP experts, - make technology your true competitive advantage. Drop us a line at hello@tsh.io.

The Software House

In software development, testing ideas, doing trials and continuously learning is the approach that leads to success. That’s why creating a minimum viable product (MVP) can be so beneficial for every business that wants to have their IT product done the right way. The concept of minimum viable product was popularized by Eric Ries, a business owner and the author of The Lean Startup. In the book, Ries analyzes the mistakes that were made by startup owners and employees, as he had lots of experience with startup culture in the USA. He was confident about his conclusion - to build a successful enterprise, the idea needs to be researched, discussed with people and tested beforehand. What is a minimum viable product? Simply put, MVP is a basic version of the product we want to develop. It has a set of features that are the most important ones for the potential user. The team of software designers and developers prepare a mobile app, or a web app that can be used and tested but doesn’t have all the functionalities assumed for the project. MVP is an integral part of the software development process. It doesn’t require that much effort to be built, but at the same time, the outcome is so insightful and helpful. Making IT products without it would be much less efficient and the final result could be much more defective. What is the purpose of a minimum viable product? The main goal of MVP is to learn. Crafting a new product, even if it’s similar to the ones that are already there, is always a challenge. Collecting required information can be hard if we can’t present any sample to the customers. And this data is crucial to achieving results in the future. The essential characteristic of a minimum viable product is the first word of the whole definition, which is “minimum”. That means we need to deliver the most basic app or website that is possible to get the desired feedback. The principle here is to share a small product with one, two, or three features instead of assumed ten. Start with the vision of functionalities that will be most useful for the customers. If you own a business, you probably know them best. Building MVP based on your vision will make the whole development process more efficient. Another purpose of MVP is to save the time and cost of the whole project. Testing the new product early in the process is the best way to avoid failures that can prolong it. Also, being able to eliminate a problem at this point is often protecting us from losing money and time. Then we can invest it in building a product that will really be appreciated by the customers - instead of wandering in the dark, trying to guess what they will like. What is the role of a minimum viable product in Agile? Agile is a work methodology that likes to iterate and validate. It considers MVP as one of the crucial stages in software development. Before we even begin the first stage of production, we should determine if your idea is profitable to our business but also if the customer can appreciate it. Agile will search for the answer. Its goal is to achieve the best result using available resources effectively. So wasting time is not an option when working this way. MVP may be one of the most successful tools to get people to talk about our product before it hits the market in its final form. How do you create a minimum viable product? At first, we need an idea. After initial discussions, workshops and arrangements with the software house of our choice, the process begins. Target group We need to remember that our MVP is dedicated to a specific group of people - our potential customers. So determining this group, its needs and desires would definitely help to find out which features should be included in the MVP. At this point, it is worth remembering that people like products and services that solve their problems in a comfortable and positive way. Think about that when you evaluate your target audience. What do they want to do in their spare time? What are their main difficulties in life? What kind of service are they looking for? Be aware of your potential clients’ desires, not just your business goals. Data analysis After running the minimum viable product for the first time, we get tons of data we need to process, analyze and draw conclusions from. At this point, it’s only the factors we can measure with internal tools that we implemented into the product. This data will help us to find out if the target group we aimed for is actually the right one. Also, we can study the consumer paths and see if the usage of our product is compatible with our predictions. Feedback from customers Now we can read the reports on bugs, missing features, as well as unnecessary features and all the other insights from the people that used our MVP. Including the information from the previous step, we can learn what was done right and what needs improvements to reach the final stage. Carefully familiarize yourself with the opinions, because they are the most critical information about our idea and the product itself. Maybe this research will determine that our initial concept isn’t as good as we thought. That’s not a reason to give up! MVP is great for situations like that because it gives us a chance to change the strategy and pursue some other project idea. Product update Based on all the collected feedback and conclusions we got from all the previous steps, we can now build another version of our product. If there’s a need for that - it can be another improved MVP to run even more tests. If not - an MVP becomes the actual product. After being updated with more functionalities and proper design, of course. Should I invest in a minimum viable product? Working on any type of business solution should be sufficient. Software development is not an exception here. Investing in MVP can bring so many benefits to the whole process. Investing in it is money well spent. Be sure to find out a reliable business partner - a company that will provide you with robust IT solutions tailor-made with your requirements in mind. At itCraft, we always propose to build a minimum viable product before the actual production stage begins. We can use it to collect feedback, test each functionality and find out what else needs to be fixed. Our company wants to provide high-quality software that delivers business value to our clients’ end-customers. Building MVPs with React Native and other technologies we specialize in is the way to understand how our products might be perceived and what we can do better. We also recommend downloading our ebook on Cross-Platform and Native development . MVP can be helpful when determining which technology to use when building an app. With this ebook, you will get a lot of insightful knowledge and business case studies that justify the choice of one or another method. Hope it will help!

Minimum Viable Product: a Crucial Stage of Development Process

Get to know the top software outsourcing company and 29 more runners-up in this latest market research by Explority. Last year, the global outsourcing market at 85.6 billion US dollars. A notable part of this market, outsourcing software development is not subsiding either. was valued at The reasons behind this upward trend are understandable: according to the , businesses turn to outsourcing as it brings cost optimization and makes them more agile, efficient, and effective. Deloitte Global Outsourcing Survey 2018 With the growing popularity of outsourcing as a service, hundreds of IT companies started positioning it as one of their core capabilities and strengths. But do all of these firms prove to be so skilled in delivering outsourcing software development? To help you define who’s who in today’s outsourcing market, we have assembled the list of the most trustworthy vendors ready to handle software development, UI/UX design, and disruptive technologies. To make the list objective, we ranked the companies according to the following criteria: technological strength ability to ensure project security focus on innovation diversity and complexity of completed projects geographical flexibility Below, we present 30 outsourcing software development companies that have showed the highest scores in these criteria over the last 12 months. 1. Iflexion Founded in 1999, Iflexion houses 850+ experts in outsourcing software development, integration, business analysis, QA, and project management. Iflexion delivers such services as custom software development for end business users, product development, and DevOps enablement, among others. The company also provides dedicated development teams and is ready to boost their software solutions with emerging technologies like AI, AR, and big data, should the project require it. Iflexion has worked with such market giants as Philips, Expedia, Toyota, and adidas, with more than 1,500 completed projects for clients in 30+ countries overall. Location: Denver, CO Founded: 1999 Major Clients: Google, eBay, PayPal, Philips, Expedia, Toyota, adidas Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: IT, Hospitality, Retail, Media, Finance Website: https://www.iflexion.com/ 2. 10Pearls With more than 350 mobile developers, software developers, designers, and researchers worldwide, 10Pearls augments businesses’ capabilities with their technological expertise. 10Pearls creates applications driven by such emerging technologies as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and augmented reality. Location: Vienna, VA Founded: 2004 Major Clients: National Geographic, Johnson & Johnson, AARP, Nextel Number of Employees: 250-999 Industry Presence: Healthcare, Media, Finance, Transportation Website: https://10pearls.com/ 3. Orases Since 2000, Orases has been delivering strategy, branding, interface design, and full-stack outsourcing software development to more than 750 clients from ten countries all around the world. The company expertizes in building products to be integrated with other systems: ERP, CRM, EMR, and others. Orases also delivers branding services, including brand, communication and social media strategies. Location: Frederick, MD Founded: 2000 Major Clients: NFL, Johns Hopkins University, Frederick County Bank, Major League Baseball Number of Employees: 10-49 Industry Presence: Healthcare, Finance, Sports Website: https://orases.com/ 4. Trigent Software US-based Trigent Software has been providing outsourcing software development  since 1995. The company delivers consulting, design, and development across cloud, mobility, business intelligence, product engineering, and emerging tech domains. Over the years, the company have designed more than 400 products adopted in large and small enterprises alike. Location: Fayville, MA Founded: 1995 Major Clients: Navistar, NEPC, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, American Heart Association Number of Employees: 250-999 Industry Presence: Finance, Healthcare, IT, Education, Transportation Website: https://www.trigent.com/ 5. Spiria Spiria is a Canadian custom software development company that has been delivering outsourcing software development for more than 15 years. Spiria offers web, mobile and UX/UI design development. Spiria specializes in user-friendly and responsive websites, from ecommerce stores to secure intranets. The company also delivers embedded systems, IoT solutions, and M2M solutions. Location: Montreal, Canada Founded: 2003 Major Clients: Autodesk, Shutterstock, Disney, Paymi, DogWatch, Evenko Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: IT, Education, Manufacturing Website: https://www.spiria.com/ 6. Fingent With an active client base across four continents and 250+ specialists on board, Fingent remains a competitive outsourcing software development company for over 15 years. They offer enterprise software development, web application development, data analytics, and digital transformation consulting. Location: White Plains, NY Founded: 2003 Major Clients: Sony, Johnson & Johnson, University of North Carolina, PwC, CBN Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: Transportation, Real Estate, Finance Website: https://www.fingent.com/ 7. STX Next Poland-based STX Next has 170+ Python, React Native, JavaScript, Android, iOS, and full-stack developers ready to take up outsourcing software development. The company also offers product design and software testing. STX Next offers end-to-end development, team extension, and project takeover. It also works with startups, helping them enter the market and scale throughout product lifecycles. Location: Poznań, Poland Founded: 2005 Major Clients: Seerene, Verve, Pixomondo, Unity, Lamden Number of Employees: 250-999 Industry Presence: Finance, IT, Real Estate Website: https://stxnext.com/ 8. Praxent Operating for more than 20 years, Praxent has delivered more than 300 software solutions in the areas of mobile and web applications development, web portals, and legacy software modernization. Besides, Praxent offers human-centered design development, branding, and rapid prototyping. Location: Austin, TX Founded: 2000 Major Clients: Cisco, Kinder Morgan, Sysco, World Market, Flex, Keller Williams Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: Finance, Healthcare, IT Website: https://praxent.com/ 9. The Software House With 129 specialists on board and 150+ successfully delivered projects, The Software House offers the following services in the niche of outsourcing software development: web and mobile development, digital product design, QA, and DevOps services. The Software House’s technological expertise includes React, Node.js, Angular, iOS, Android, and React Native. Location: Gliwice, Poland Founded: 2012 Major Clients: Smartum, Synerise, eSky Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: Finance, Manufacturing, Healthcare Website: https://tsh.io/ 10. AgileEngine Over the past nine years, AgileEngine has delivered more than 70 projects in outsourcing software development, including risk modeling and case management software, tracking platforms, and BI tools. Besides UI, web, mobile, and enterprise software development, AgileEngine provides QA services that include load, stress, performance, security, and usability testing. Location: McLean, VA Founded: 2010 Major Clients: Needles, Logi Analytics, Farmers Edge, LivingSocial Number of Employees: 250-999 Industry Presence: IT, Healthcare Website: https://agileengine.com/ 11. Highland Solutions Established in 1999, Highland Solutions is a Chicago-based custom software development company that engineers and integrates web and mobile applications, multi-tenant custom platforms, and CRM systems. Highland Solutions also offers development of OutSystems low-code platforms that automate time-consuming and monotonous manual tasks. Location: Chicago, IL Founded: 1999 Major Clients: Thrivent Financial, The Delta Institute, Morton Arboretum, Creative Group, Harvard University Health Services Number of Employees: 10-49 Industry Presence: Finance, Manufacturing, Education, Healthcare, IT Website: https://highlandsolutions.com/ 12. Merixstudio Since 1999, Merixstudio has provided outsourcing software development to more than 200 customers from a variety of market segments. The software development company specializes in web development, Python programming, frontend development, React Native mobile development, and UX/UI design. Location: Poznań, Poland Founded: 1999 Major Clients: Fox, The Independent, DFJ, Divio Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: Finance, Education, Real Estate, Sport Website: https://www.merixstudio.com/ 13. Caxy Interactive Serving outsourcing software development from its Chicago-based office, Caxy Interactive expertizes in Drupal, JavaScript, and Python development, ecommerce solutions, and machine learning. The software development company also offers strategy development and Agile consulting services. Besides, Caxy Interactive takes up UX and web design projects. Location: Chicago, IL Founded: 1999 Major Clients: International Code Council, The Field Museum, Rush University Medical Center, Uptake Technologies Number of Employees: 10-49 Industry Presence: Finance, Education, Manufacturing, IT Website: https://www.caxy.com/ 14. Boldare Founded in 2004, Boldare was formed after a merger of two software development companies, XSolve and Chilid. So far, the company’s team of 130+ technological experts have delivered 250+ projects. Boldare provides full-cycle outsourcing software development, prototyping, and design. It also offers digital transformation services. Location: Gliwice, Poland Founded: 2004 Major Clients: BlaBlaCar, Sonnen, Takamol, Holiday Taxis, Agnito Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: Energy, Media, Ecommerce, Healthcare Website: https://www.boldare.com/ 15. MojoTech US-located MojoTech outsourcing software development and engineering, UX/UI design, and digital transformation services. Besides, the company mentors their clients’ in-house IT teams. For more than 11 years of their market presence, MojoTech’s team of 65 delivered 150+ software development projects. Location: Providence, RI Founded: 2008 Major Clients: AccuWeather, Aetna, Groove, Blue Cross Blue Shield, United Way Number of Employees: 10-49 Industry Presence: Finance, Consumer Services, IT Website: https://www.mojotech.com/ 16. ClearSummit ClearSummit is a software development company offering mobile and web app development, frontend and backend development, and UI/UX design. The company also offers discovery and technical advisory consultations. Additionally, ClearSummit offers software maintenance and support services to help clients fix bugs and upgrade their systems. Location: Marina del Rey, CA Founded: 2014 Major Clients: Belkin, TuneRegistry, SCH Travel, Musea Number of Employees: 10-49 Industry Presence: Consumer Services, IT, Media, Real Estate Website: http://clearsumm.it 17. Future Processing Established in 2000, Future Processing have delivered 500 solutions to 150+ clients from all over the world. The company’s expertise in outsourcing software development includes software development and consulting using .NET, Java, React, Angular, and other programming languages. The software development company brings to its clients such emerging technologies as AI, blockchain, and big data analytics, and delivers software audit and business intelligence setup. Location: Gliwice, Poland Founded: 2000 Major Clients: Tenneco, Ista, Valeo, TechSoup, Thomas Miller Number of Employees: 250-999 Industry Presence: Finance, Healthcare, Transportation, Real Estate Website: https://www.future-processing.com/ 18. Moove It Being a leading outsourcing software development company, Moove It offers product discovery, web and mobile apps development, testing automation, as well as digital transformation services. Besides these, the company provides technological and Agile coaching. Location: Austin, TX Founded: 2006 Major Clients: Unilever, Verifone, Disney, Sierra Wireless Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: Consumer Services, Education, Finance, Healthcare, IT Website: https://moove-it.com/ 19. iTexico Since its inception in 2010, iTexico has been delivering UI/UX design, software engineering, QA, mobile and cloud development from its six US-based offices. To make their outsourcing software development as efficient as possible, iTexico follows Agile, DevOps, and Lean methodologies. Location: Austin, TX Founded: 2010 Major Clients: Undisclosed Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: IT, Healthcare, Manufacturing Website: https://www.itexico.com/ 20. Django Stars European company Django Stars has been delivering its software solutions for almost 11 years. The company offers web and mobile app development, design, and QA. Django Stars also expertizes in data science, data architecture, intelligent chatbots, and big data analytics. The company’s core strength is in its Python development expertise: Django Stars promises to create any type of product using this programming language. Location: Kiev, Ukraine Founded: 2008 Major Clients: MoneyPark, Sindeo, Molo Finance, Clear Minds Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: Finance, Transportation, Healthcare, Real Estate, Hospitality Website: https://djangostars.com 21. Spire Digital US-based Spire Digital boasts 300+ products launched and 600+ clients served to an overall 98% satisfaction rate. The company delivers digital transformation, Agile process optimization, CX research, data science consulting, and lean product development. Besides all of these and expertise in AI, blockchain, and IoT, Spire Digital offers digital marketing strategy development. Location: Denver, CO Founded: 1998 Major Clients: TomTom, Lockheed Martin, US Navy, Helix, Western Union Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: Education, Finance, Healthcare, Ecommerce Website: https://www.spiredigital.com/ 22. KitelyTech Delivering to clients of all sizes, including startups and Fortune 500 companies, KitelyTech offers web and mobile app design, ecommerce solutions, data analytics consulting, QA, and more. The company offers SEO services as well. Among the emerging technologies that KitelyTech is offering, there are AI, blockchain, and AR. Location: Chicago, IL Founded: 2009 Major Clients: Karrot Health, Plastic Surgery Clinic of Chicago, Olympus, J.P. McMahon Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: Healthcare, IT, Transportation Website: https://kitelytech.com/ 23. Table XI US-based Table XI has been a trusted supplier of outsourcing software development for over 16 years. The company provides digital strategy and product design, along with mobile and custom web development. So far, the company have joined forces with at least 100 global clients. Location: Chicago, IL Founded: 2002 Major Clients: Dept. of Medicine of the Northwestern University, Journal for the American Medical Association, AccuWeather, Dickson Number of Employees: 10-49 Industry Presence: Healthcare, Manufacturing, Education Website: https://www.tablexi.com/ 24. Syberry Having a 94% client retention rate, Syberry serves at least 20 industries in the US alone. The company provides a whole range of services, including custom software development, QA, business analysis, and technology consulting. Syberry’s expertise also includes cloud, ERP, SaaS, big data, blockchain, and IoT. Location: Austin, TX Founded: 2014 Major Clients: Bombardier, PayPal, Disney, Shell, Livestream Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: Finance, Healthcare, Retail, Education, Energy, Transportation Website: https://www.syberry.com/ 25. Vincit California Vincit California is a 400+ employee company engineering mobile apps, web portals, and embedded systems. Besides, Vincit offers UX/UI design. The company has seven offices around the world, which makes it specifically fit for global software development outsourcing. Location: Irvine, CA Founded: 2007 Major Clients: Nokia, Logitech, Yamaha, Roadtrip Nation, Sigora, Fastems Number of Employees: 250-999 Industry Presence: IT, Finance, Telecommunications Website: https://www.vincit.com/ 26. Napoleon IT UK-located DCSL offers outsourcing software development, software and hardware integration, IT consulting, and ongoing system support. The company’s other services include team augmentation, data migration, legacy software modernization, and others. Location: Reston, VA Founded: 2011 Major Clients: Unilever, Severstal, Russian Railways, Yamaha Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: Retail, Ecommerce, Healthcare, Consumer Services Website: https://napoleonit.com/ 27. DCSL Software UK-located DCSL offers software development, software and hardware integration, IT consulting, and ongoing system support. The company’s other services include team augmentation, data migration, legacy software modernization, and others. Location: London, United Kingdom Founded: 1994 Major Clients: WaterAid, Mitsubishi, Hospify, Abbott, Lidl, Pearson Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: Healthcare, Education, Manufacturing, Real Estate, IT Website: https://www.dcslsoftware.com/ 28. DockYard Since 2010, DockYard has been delivering product strategy, UX, digital design, software development, software support, and maintenance services. DockYard also provides QA and testing, team augmentation, and business analysis. Location: Boston, MA Founded: 2010 Major Clients: Netflix, Apple, NASDAQ, Zipcar, Fidelity Investments, Harvard University Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: IT, Transportation, Education Website: https://dockyard.com 29. SoftwareMill SoftwareMill helps its clients tackle IT challenges with outsourcing software development, data science, system integration, and analytics. The company delivers enterprise solutions, UI/UX design, mobile and web applications, and DevOps integration. Location: Warsaw, Poland Founded: 2009 Major Clients: Tipser, Knip, Flexys Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: Finance, IT, Energy, Ecommerce Website: https://softwaremill.com/ 30. Tivix Specializing in Agile development of cloud-connected web and mobile applications, Tivix is a US-based company housing 65+ experienced developers across six offices worldwide. The company’s expertise in outsourcing software development includes API, database, Django, Angular, and React development. Location: San Francisco, CA Founded: 2008 Major Clients: Apple, Tesla, SolarCity, Zoetis, VMware Number of Employees: 50-249 Industry Presence: Finance, IT, Consumer Services, Healthcare What Does the Future Hold for Outsourcing Software Development Companies? As time passes and businesses start looking for new technologies such as cognitive computing and RPA, some of these vendors can start lagging or cease delivering outsourcing at all. To keep the listing current and help you keep tabs on in this ever-changing market, we’ll continue monitoring the best outsourcing software companies. Stay tuned. ) (Find out more about Explority and our ranking methodology, click here and here

Top 30 Outsourcing Software Development Companies in 2020

Is it possible to create a useful API in the course of a day or two? That’s exactly what the authors of the new framework called API Platform promise to us. However, you probably wonder if it’s really worthwhile to spend time getting to know yet another tool. Well, it depends. One of the most important challenges in the software development is to “not reinvent the wheel”. That’s why, from the beginning of the history of coding, developers have tried to create solutions that’d speed up their work by automating the most repetitive processes. However, selecting tools that’ll really meet your requirements is almost always a painful procedure. Among the most promising frameworks/tools that have shown up in the PHP world recently is API Platform. In my work, I often consult solutions with my clients — who usually are CTOs as myself. And now, more and more often, I get questions about API Platform. Is it really a useful framework or just some temporary hype? We’ve used API Platform in The Software House in a dozen of projects now, therefore, I feel like I already have enough experience to share with you some of our thoughts. OK, what’s that? API Platform was created in 2015 by a Symfony expert, Kévin Dunglas. It was claimed to be one of the most important development events on SymfonyCon in Paris, alongside Platform.sh and Blackfire.io. Among those three, I think API Platform was the most successful one. While the first version had indeed some annoying mechanisms, the framework was greatly enhanced in version 2. But let’s start from the beginning: what does it actually do? In short, it’s a tool based on the PHP Symfony framework which helps you speed up building the backend part of your project. Especially in the beginning of the development process (but sometimes on later stages as well), we have to put the same code over and over again without any or with some little changes, for example when implementing the paging mechanism or an authorisation system. It doesn’t matter if you’re creating an app for a bookshop or for a car renting company — for sure there’ll be a list of some items, a place where you can add an item, edit it and, of course, delete it. Mechanisms which allow you to speed up the development of those parts are called CRUD or boilerplate. And there are lots of them on the market. You’ve probably already used Admin Generator for Symfony 1 or Scaffolding for Ruby on Rails. What’s new in API Platform is that times have changed and now we’re facing a completely different approach to architecture. All the previous solutions were creating monolith codes where backend and frontend were created on the server side. Now, we tend to implement more service-oriented architecture with a backend API that serves the data and a couple of clients consuming it — for example frontend SPA applications or mobile apps. API Platform focuses only on API, leaving the presentation layer to others. What exactly does API Platform give us from the beginning? Here’s the list of my favourites: — JSON, XML, CSV, whatever you need. You can also change the format with one simple alteration in a configuration file. All methods serve POST, PUT, GET and DELETE options. A ready-to-use API based on REST with a variety of formats to choose , using one of the most popular PHP frameworks now — Symfony. The API is built securely on the best programming practices and shipped with a caching mechanism (Varnish). It’s already optimised (we all know how much developers hate to write any docs, leave alone supporting them in a long term). Plus a fancy mini-console to run simple queries and play around with the examples. There’s an automatically-generated documentation . This stuff can be enabled with just a few lines of code. You don’t have to worry about things like filters, paging mechanisms or error messages If I was about to present estimation for building from scratch an API which, for example, handles about 3 database entities (let’s say, we have a school with classes, teachers and students and need to build a really simple CRM) with some authorisation, filters, paging and documentation, I’d say it’d took about 2–3 weeks to implement. With API Platform we can prepare it in one day. OK, I know what you’re thinking at this moment: RAD is only good at the beginning, as when you go deeper, there are always problems. Isn’t it the same here? Yes — that’s also true in this situation. After the basic setup, things tend to be a little more complicated than in the tutorial on the API Platform’s website (BTW: a very good tutorial). After you create a database as you like and configure all the relations, you’ll probably need some custom fields or some custom business logic for your API. You start to look for the code and it occurs that there isn’t any! You have to do everything via the special filters or create customised controllers. And both solutions require pretty good knowledge of Symfony — the framework on which everything’s built here (I’ll get back to it later). API Platform’s documentation used to be one of its biggest flaws but now it’s updated and very useful Is this for basic projects or rather for advanced ones? Actually, it’s for both — the main problem is the gap in between. If you’re a beginner and just want to create a very simple API, you can for sure use this tool but please do not expect that you’ll be able to customise it exactly as you wish. I’ve also seen frontend developers who wanted to specialise their app on frontend side using one of the modern SPA frameworks (like Angular or React for example) but still needed a simple API that’ll deliver them some backend data — API Platform worked very well for them. The same situation is with mobile apps. I know that right now there are similar solutions just delivering you simple backend service in the cloud, like Firebase, but for me it’s still easier and faster to run API Platform on my server than to configure it all using some cloud panel. It also gives me more flexibility. If you just follow the tutorial and change the sample database names to your own, you should really get your app within one day tops. It’s also available as a Docker container, but my advice is to not use it if you haven’t had anything in common with Docker before — you’ll just get frustrated at the beginning and lose lots of precious time and nerves. Installing it via composer (the second installation method in the tutorial) is, in my opinion, way more intuitive. But what if I want to create a more complicated app? Yes, you can create almost everything you want. But only under one condition — before you begin, you have to really know Symfony first. This is the biggest advantage and the biggest flaw of this solution — it’s all standing on top of another framework. Furthermore, as I’ve mentioned above, API Platform isn’t generating a CRUD code that you can just modify as you wish. I’ve used such code-generating solutions and they were very good at the beginning (you can just get some code and modify it easily without reading any further instructions) but there were certain issues with that: . Sometimes even despite following very good programming practices. If you’re not an experienced developer, it becomes very messy soon . You cannot generate it again for some database changes. There are some solutions which allow that but you need to cope with pretty confusing overriding mechanisms. After modifying any part of the pre-generated code, there’s no turning back API Platform isn’t generating any code ­–­­­ it creates the content “on the fly”. It’s not really a new solution, as I remember similar tools being available years ago (even API Platform’s predecessor, Admin Panel from Symfony 1) but the problem with these older mechanisms was that usually you had very low flexibility on what you could create — limited to what the author allowed you to do. Here the things are a little different, as API Platform is built following the “Symfony way” of how things should work, meaning it’s based on event-driven mechanisms. How deeply should I know Symfony before using API Platform? As I wrote above, if you really need to do advanced things in API Platform, you need to know Symfony first. If you’ve created a couple of Symfony-based apps before and you love it, API Platform will be a perfect enhancement for you. If not, you should first focus on understanding how Symfony works. Here are the three most important things to learn: — That’s basically the first and most important part of Symfony you really need to get to know. You can find the documentation here: . The only way you can modify anything within the API is if you hook into one of the events. To do it properly and avoid situations when you’re asking yourself “Why this @#$ isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do?”, you really need to know how events are working in Symfony and which events API Platform is using. EventStack https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/http_kernel.html — All the data that’s transferred via API goes through a serialisation component built in Symfony. You can find the documentation here: . If you’re wondering why the given field or structure isn’t displayed in the GET method, the issue probably lays in the serialisation. Serializer https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/serializer.html — You may have met this pattern in other modern frameworks. The general idea is that all the things should be independent of each other and then just bonded together at the final stage by “injecting one to another” — it improves the sustainability of the code and is a must-have in modern apps right now. Here’s the description of how Symfony handles that: . As you might suspect, API Platform is also injecting its code to other services and can also benefit from services that you wish to inject. Dependency Injection http://symfony.com/doc/current/components/dependency_injection.html There’s also one more thing that some PHP developers might not be familiar with — annotations. Annotations first started to be a popular solution in Java and soon migrated to other platforms, including PHP. The basic concept is that you define how the class or method should behave by commenting it in a proper way on top of it. Some frameworks use annotations so much, that in many cases the comment before the method name contains more data and instructions than the code itself — API Platform is definitely one of them. I call such approach “annotation programming”. It can be very useful and descriptive but if you haven’t been familiar with such things before, you’ll need to get used to it now. Here’ a link for further reading: . Of course, you can still use XML or YAML but I strongly recommend to get to know annotations, as it seems that they’re the future of programming. http://php-annotations.readthedocs.io/en/latest/UsingAnnotations.html This is a pretty big threshold to cross. Is it worth it? If you know Symfony very well, along with API Platform you have a very powerful tool in hand. Creating APIs will be much more simple and cost-effective, everything based on a foundation of a very solid framework which is Symfony. But what if you’re not so familiar with the solutions I’ve mentioned above? Learning all of this stuff requires a lot of time and practice. In return, you just receive an ability to speed up the process of creating the most common element of the API. However, in my opinion, it’s worth it. You’ll have to learn most of those components anyway if you’re planning to create a long-term project — if not in this framework, they’ll still appear in other. Although at first this solution might be very hard to implement (you might be frustrated that the things aren’t working as you expected), there’s a good reason why it works this way, as it prevents developer from making a mess in the code which was one of the biggest problems in PHP some time ago. API Platform’s pet spider showing his love for other frameworks — especially Symfony It seems like you’re defending API Platform. Does it have any flaws? Like all frameworks, API Platform also has some annoying issues that you just have to cope with. For me, the most important one is that you often cannot directly find help for the issue you’re dealing with on the internet. If you just type “API Platform <the problem you have>” in Google, you probably won’t find any solution and might be under impression that the community is very small. That’s because 90% of questions regarding API Platform are in fact questions about Symfony itself. Those questions are answered by the Symfony community — which, lucky for us, is a pretty big one. Therefore, in order to find your answer, you should rather search Symfony forums than the API Platform ones. This, of course, means that you have to ask the right questions and (again) know Symfony quite well. You can also get help by asking on GitHub — very often from Kévin Dunglas (the creator of API Platform) himself. Second thing is the naming convention. Like any other CRUD solution, API Platform has to generate some names of classes and methods on its own. Usually, those names reflect the names used in the database but you still have to guess how the particular method or filter has been named. For example, when working with API Platform in The Software House, we had a table named “Language Spoken” and we got a method for retrieving all languages that users speak. There was a lot of confusion about the auto-generated name: will it be “getLanguagesSpoken” or “getLanguageSpokens” or maybe something else? We finally got a debugger tool from Symfony (which I also suggest you should do) to see the call stack and found out what the generated name was in fact. As other CRUD solutions which I’ve seen on the market, API Platform also has issues with virtual fields. Basically, the concept of such automated tools is that we have some database and that’s the main source of all the data and structure. However, sometimes we need to return values that are not directly stored in the database but just calculated based on some business logic (or, for example, fetched from some 3rd party source). In these cases, you can still add such fields to the API but they won’t be 100% supported and you may expect some issues with that. For example, sorting is by default executed as the database query, so for a virtual field, you cannot add sorting easily (even if you implement some functions providing sorting rules). It’s also worth mentioning that although you can use any output provided by API Platform in your other Symfony bundles, it is very complicated to make API Platform use any other bundles and make API out of them. For example, if you’re using SonataAdminBundle or Sylius (which are very popular solutions in Symfony) you cannot count on API Platform to create API from the code provided there. Summary I grew up in the gaming community where there’s the saying that good games are “easy to learn and hard to master” — I think this sentence also describes API Platform. If you just want to quickly create a very simple API, this tool will be very suitable for you. If you want something more — it’s also possible but, unless you’re a Symfony expert, you’ll need some time and practice to achieve it. Although I always approach fresh projects with reserve (API Platform is just 2 years old now, which for me is a very short period of time), I think this framework is a very promising solution. By releasing the second version about half a year ago, the guys from the core team have really shown that they were able to fix their own mistakes and were listening to the community. Most of the annoying problems from the first version were solved, for example, now there’s a possibility to use subresources from parent resource instead of creating two separate API endpoints for that. It’s a sign that the framework is going in a good direction. To be honest, I’ve also wanted to write something about gaps in the documentation. We were even planning to release our internal subsidiary document explaining differences between documentation on their site and the real code situation. But, meanwhile, the documentation has been updated — which also shows that the framework is still evolving and we might expect even better versions in the future. The article was written by Marek Gajda and was first published on The Software House Blog . Visit the blog for more articles on best development practices and software outsourcing tips.

Practical guide to API Platform: How to tell if it’s the right framework for you

CSS Houdini and the future of frontend development

In the last few years, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland became true technological powerhouses. However, such success comes with a price: software developer salaries in the Nordics are skyrocketing and it’s getting really hard to find a new employee. This is the reason why more and more companies choose IT outsourcing — but this outsourcing looks quite different than a few years ago… Nordic IT market in 2018/2019 The technological advancement of the Nordic region isn’t something to argue about. In the last edition of the , 4 out of 5 top places were taken by Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. And it’s not only because of the multi-billion dollar companies like Spotify. Small and medium-sized enterprises representing various branches are also investing in new technologies, developing web and mobile apps to enhance their client base. Digital Evolution Index Technological progress results in a significant inflow of capital but, as Daxx puts it, “With more investments fueling the market growth, the demand for software developers will grow.” Countries with the highest level of labour market stress — it’s most difficult to find new employees there (Source: ) Hays Global Skills Index 2017 And it’s already a problem for the Nordic companies. Among all the countries in the , Sweden has the highest level of labour market stress. And Denmark, which was in a slightly better situation year before, is almost catching up now. What does it mean exactly? The biggest problem for both countries is the so-called talent mismatch. To quote the report, “businesses face serious difficulty in matching available talent with unfilled jobs”. Hays Global Skill Index 2017 It’s especially visible on the software development market. that the country will come short of 19,000 IT specialists by 2030 and, according to the Finnish Information Processing Association, Finland will be lacking 15,000 IT engineers by 2020. Of course, it’s good news for the software developers, as they can demand more from their employers, not only in terms of salary but also additional benefits and work-life balance. The rising demands of software engineers can be satisfied by global tech moguls, like Microsoft, IBM and Uber, which are currently expanding in the Nordics. But what about smaller players? Danish government predicts Without the proper workforce, small and medium enterprises won’t be able to scale up their businesses. They can, of course, wait for governments to improve the education system, but it’s a process which will take at least a few years. It’s also possible to create training programmes and, for example, teach immigrants to code. In fact, as informs in its report, some companies, like Integrify, have already started such projects. Unfortunately, this way you can only fill junior-level positions (and it still takes a few months). Daxx All in all, more and more Nordic companies realise that, in the present situation, the best decision is to outsource. Lucky for them, the world of outsourcing has recently changed a lot. Changed for the better. IT outsourcing destinations and trends Of course, Nordic companies are not new to outsourcing. Back in 2015, announced in her article that “Indian outsourcing is booming in the Nordics”. And she was right, as even the biggest enterprises decided to hire remote workers from India — just like the Norwegian DNB bank which sealed a seven-year deal with HCL Technologies. However, the situation has changed since then and in 2017, when writing again about outsourcing in the Nordics, that: Eeva Haaramo from Computer Weekly Haaramo noticed “Although Indian providers remain prominent on the list, their success in the Nordic market showed signs of wavering, with several falling in the rankings.” Why exactly? Because a new opportunity appeared. Nordic companies have recently realised that, instead of employing remote workers from offshore countries like India, they can outsource to their neighbours in Central and Eastern Europe — and this is pretty much the definition of “nearshoring”. Why is it such a hot topic recently? What are the benefits of nearshoring? Many experts talk about geographic proximity: when outsourcing to Poland or Ukraine, you don’t need to google “time difference between…” every other day, as the difference is 1 hour or nothing at all. Other outsourcing experts focus not only on geographical but also on more elusive aspects — according to them, it’s easier to work with people when there are cultural, social and political linkages. List of countries with the best software developers (Source: ) Hacker Rank This is all true, but when it comes to software outsourcing, there are things which matter even more than geographic or cultural proximity. The most important one, which you want to check before starting any collaboration in the IT world, is the technological proficiency of the developers. Fortunately, thanks to the magic of the internet, we can compare IT engineers from various countries. And, according to the extensive report by , developers from CEE are among the very best ones, with Poland securing the 3rd place — outscoring not only India but also United States, Japan and all of the Nordic countries. Hacker Rank However, everyone who has worked in IT for some time knows that high-quality code is not enough. Following the principles of agile software development, you want to contact the remote development team almost on a daily basis. And to do that, you need them to be communicative and to know English very well. It’s especially important for Nordic companies, as Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland are among the very best English-speaking countries in the world, according to the ranking. And this is why Nordic companies want to outsource to Central and Eastern Europe — in the English Proficiency Index ranking, Poland secures the 11th place in the world. Just to compare, India is 27th and China 36th. EF English Proficiency Index The most cost-effective choice All in all, the nearshoring revolution brought IT outsourcing to the next level. 5 or 10 years ago, software companies outsourced their processes when they needed simple, straightforward body leasing. A fairly easy, repetitive job was done by remote workers while the most important lines of code were still written in-house. Nowadays, as Nordic countries experience lack of software engineers on the market, things are different. Simple body leasing is not enough. When outsourcing, modern software companies need complete teams of IT experts which can understand their business and perform the tasks at least as good as the local developers. And it’s nearshoring that seems to satisfy these expectations. But, at this point, we must ask ourselves one more question: what about the money? If the developers in CEE write top-quality code and, at the same time, have very good soft skills, their services must cost a lot, right? When compared to India or China — yes. But for Nordic companies, they are still a bargain. As explained by : “Although Eastern Europe doesn’t offer costs that are as low as those found in India or China, (…) it can argue that it provides better product quality, a proximity to Western Europe, cultural affinity, a better business environment, and high-level skills.” Andrada Fiscutean from ZDNet Let’s talk numbers. Recently, has prepared an up-to-date list of average software developer salaries. In Norway and Denmark, it’s circa $70,000 (or €60,000) per year, in Sweden and in Finland — respectively $53,000 (€45,000) and $47,000 (€40,000). When we look at the data gathered by , the numbers are almost identical. And the conclusion is the same: all four countries are among the highest paying in the world. What about Central and Eastern Europe? Daxx PayScale Average software developer in Poland earns $24,000 (€20,000) per year. Therefore, it’s half the salary of a Finnish developer and one-third of a Norwegian developer’s paycheck. Summary of how average hourly rates, team size and years of experience vary in different regions — among others, in Western and Eastern Europe (Source: ) SourceSeek Makes you think, doesn’t it? However, it’s still only an average salary of a software developer — and you probably aren’t planning to open a new office in Poland anyway soon. When talking about outsourcing, it’s best to focus on the average cost of a software developer in an outsourcing company. Preferably, an average hourly rate — and this is exactly what we can find in the recent report prepared by . An average hourly cost of a software developer in a software house in Eastern Europe is circa $35 (or €30), which is 25% less than in similar companies in Western Europe. And that’s not everything! A typical software company in Eastern Europe was founded in 2010, almost a decade ago, which means one thing: . SourceSeek besides outsourcing itself, you can also get their know-how Finding the best IT outsourcing company With the average number of , as well as the total , being almost the same for all aforementioned countries, you must realise one thing: Nordic companies which decided to outsource to CEE simply did their math. You can get a team of world-class developers and pay for them the fraction of what you used to pay locally. Too good to be true? Well, many people still think so. Some are worried that they will lose . Others don’t believe that outsourcing can be a long-term solution. working hours paid leave control over the remote team But you know what’s the best? That nowadays there’s no use of worrying, as you can check everything on your own. There are independent research companies, like , which gather reviews on software development teams around the world. Do a little research and check out what previous clients think about a certain software house. Find out if they have: good project managers supervising the developers, experience in long-term projects and experience in the technology of your choice. Everything checked? Then open up a new email window and start . It seems that you may be the next entrepreneur wishing to benefit from nearshoring. Clutch writing an enquiry The article was written by Marcin Mazurek and was first published on The Software House Blog . Visit the blog for more articles on software outsourcing tips and best development practices.

The State of Nordic IT Outsourcing

If you’re unsatisfied with the world as it is, you may feel tempted to enhance it. To make it more beautiful. And, in 2018, Google and their ARCore Android can help you achieve that. ARCore is a development platform for building augmented reality apps. In this article, I’ll walk you through its functionalities and how the technology itself can enrich your everyday life. I’ll also show you, step by step, how to make your own ARCore app. What is augmented reality? You could say that augmented reality allows you to create your own world using your mobile phone. In technical terms, AR makes it possible to enhance your real-world environment with computer-generated 3D models, images and videos. When you look at something through your phone’s camera, you see/hear all the virtual additions as a part of the environment. Provided, of course, that you install a required AR app. ? It’s probably because there are so many ways you can use it — the only limit is your imagination. Augmented reality has the potential to impact and enrich all aspects of our lives. Read on to find out how. Why is AR one of the most popular technologies of 2018 What is ARCore Android? Since my article focuses on ARCore, let’s begin with a short trip into the past. On February 23, 2018, Google released ARCore ver. 1.0.0. Since then, Android has been supporting augmented reality. In the first version, Google implemented basic functionalities, like: tracking a phone’s position in the real world, detecting the size and location of environmental planes, as well as understanding the environment’s current lighting conditions. In addition to these features, ARCore 1.0 introduced oriented points which allow you to place virtual objects on non-horizontal or non-planar textured surfaces. On April 17, 2018, Google released ARCore Android ver. 1.1.0, which included: API for synchronously (at the same frame) acquiring the image from a camera frame (without manually copying the image buffer from the GPU to the CPU); API for getting colour correction information for the images captured by the camera. On May 8, we got a huge release, in which Google added: cloud Anchors API that enables developers to build shared Google ARCore experiences across iOS and Android. This is done by allowing anchors created on one device to be transformed into cloud anchors and shared with users on other devices; augmented Images API that enables ARCore apps to detect and track images; vertical plane detection, which means that ARCore started detecting both horizontal and vertical planes. At the time of writing this post, Google has already released ARCore Android ver. 1.3.0, which supports: new method on Frame, _getAndroidSensorPose(), which_returns the world-space pose of the Android sensor frame); new methods on Camera: which returns the camera image’s camera intrinsics and which returns the camera texture’s camera intrinsics; getImageIntrinsics() getTextureIntrinsics() new class that provides the unrotated physical characteristics for a camera, which consists of its focal length, pricinpal point, and image dimensions; CameraIntrinsics new method on Session which returns the config set by Session.configure(). getConfig() ARCore Android in action In the previous section, I wrote about the functionalities of Google ARCore. Now, let’s leave the technical details behind for a while and appreciate just how visually impressive augmented reality is. Are you ready to see how you can incorporate it into your life? Imagine it’s beautiful outside and you’re going on a bike trip to a brand new place. You’ve never been there before, so, of course, you’ll need a guide. With augmented reality, your phone can serve as an excellent guide, showing you where to go based on your location. Here’s one example: Or let’s say you’ve just moved to a big city, but you don’t have any friends there yet, so you don’t know how to get to all the interesting places. If you have an ARCore compatible device, it’ll locate all the points of interest nearby and show them to you real-time. All you need to do is point your phone at the street. ARCore Android can also assist you when you want to decorate your new place or buy a new piece of furniture that doesn’t clash with the rest. Just point your phone where you want to place the new stuff. There’s a lot of ideas and concepts on how to use AR. On this movie there are some examples: How to make an ARCore app In the remaining part of this article, I’ll teach you how to create a simple ARCore app with markers and videos. In ARCore, markers are 2D images in the user’s environment, such as posters or product packaging. In your app, you will use markers to show a 3D model of the Earth and a short video played after the user clicks on the model. This will be the first step to creating something bigger later on, e.g. your own guide for a museum. Let’s get to work! You need to start with the environment configuration. Doing it requires basic knowledge of Android Studio and Kotlin. The next step is configuring your . Remember that the min sdk version for ARCore is 24. In your add dependencies: build.gradle build.gradle, In your , add permissions for the camera: AndroidManifest.xml When you run your application, you have to make sure that you installed it on an ARCore-supported device. There are two ways to do that: use ARFragment — you don’t need to write code to check if ARCore Android is installed on your device; ARFragment will do it for you! write code which will check all ARCore statuses  Here’s an example of the latter: Okay, now that your environment is up and running, you can start building the app. As I mentioned before, it will show you a fraction of ARCore’s power.  I decided to use popular markers (2D images). Inside ARCore Android, they’re called AugmentedImages. First of all, you need to add images which your app will recognise and show as 3D models on your screen. You also need to install a scene plugin for an easy sceneform asset import. This can be done in: id Studio -> Preferences -> Plugins, select Browse repositories… -> Search Google Sceneform Tools, click Install. Now you have everything to start importing 3D models into your project. Time to find some models! You may start with this . Just remember that models should be OBJ, FBX, or glTF. For more information about importing 3D models into your ARCore app, check out this [ website site. ](https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/java/sceneform/import-assets)Great! You’ve imported models into our app. Now, let’s have some fun! Create an assets folder inside your project, in your app package. You’ll be saving images for markers and videos there. Remember to use only .jpg and .png image files.  With images and videos in the assets folder plus imported models, you can finally start coding. First of all, you need to create a method for loading an image as a marker, from assets into Bitmap: In my example, I used an image from google samples for ARCore Android, but you can choose any image you want. Now, you need to add a database to store all the images for markers, for the recognition purposes. In order to do that, add: As you can see, you’ve built AugmentedImageDatabase and used the previous method to add an image. After that, it’s time to configure a session: This method should be invoked in onResume() method.  So, you’ve created methods for importing images from assets as well as adding them to the database and session configuration. The only thing left to implement is showing 3D models after the scan marker. Piece of cake! Start by creating an update method, which you’ll use for updating the displayed model: Last step is adding this method in the update listener for the surface view: That’s it! Try scanning the image and you should see a 3D model of the Earth on your screen (or whatever image you chose). Thanks to ARCore, you can see a 3D model of the Earth on a smartphone screen How to add a video in ARCore Android Your ARCore app now allows you to import images and 3D models, add them to the database and show a 3D model after scan marker. But one thing is still missing — showing and playing videos. ARCore doesn’t support playing videos in a straightforward way. To implement it, you need to use OpenGL. I used the code from This is exactly what we want. If you create a class from the gist, the only thing left to do is add some code in your here. MainActivity.class: step 1 — you need to extend GLSurfaceView.Renderer, step 2 — in your layout for MainActivity, add: step 3 — in onCreate method, add: step 4 — add code for drawing frame with a video: final step — add a click listener for your 3D model in the onUpdateFrame method: That’s it! You can find the full code for MainActivity here. After applying all the previous steps, you should get something like that: _Edit description_streamable.com mobizen_20180808_131833 - Streamable Congratulations! You’ve just created an app that can display a 3D model and, after you click on it, shows you a video! It’s amazing what you can do with ARCore Android Summary As you can see, creating a more beautiful world with augmented reality is very simple. Google ARCore gives you the freedom to make almost anything you want. Why almost? The technology is still very young — with amazing potential, but without many features we need. Google developers are gradually adding new features and fixing bugs, but there’s a lot to be done. Still, despite all the bugs and missing features, ARCore Android is worth getting familiar with. At least, that’s what I think. Postscriptum In my project, I’ve used the info from an article titled: . I’ve also used some code from Google ARCore samples. You can find all the code for this project Playing video in ARCore using OpenGL here. The article was written by Łukasz Juszczyk and was first published on The Software House Blog . Visit the blog for more articles on best development practices and software outsourcing tips.

Making the world beautiful with ARCore Android

N ew technologies are evolving rapidly. Some of the newest solutions are gaining popularity every day. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is nothing new, but perfecting it with machine learning may shed a new light on OCR. It’s obviously a broad subject. Nevertheless, I’ll try to briefly introduce you to the machine learning within OCR implementation on Android. I’ll also present some of its functions, basing on an easily available software called Google Firebase ML Kit. What is OCR? Nowadays, almost everything is digital. Books, newspapers, articles — name it. So what can be done to make a written or printed text digitized or even translated? Optical Character Recognition (OCR) comes with the solution. It’s capable of finding the text on the images and making it digital. Whenever you need to split the expenses between you and your friends — it’s always a problem. Who and how much should pay for pizza or drinks? Now, you can take a photo of a receipt and an application on your smartphone can split the expenses for you. It can even send the reminders about the payment to your friends. Also, searching for the information about a bus line may be easier. By taking a photo of a bus number or a name of a bus stop, you can get the information about a bus line you need. How does it work? Computers are dumb themselves and can’t recognize anything from an image. For them, every picture is just a bunch of pixels, basic information about colours. To help the computer find what you need, we can teach it how to recognize the letters. It’s known as a pattern recognition. It can be used for a text that has the same font, size and spacing from the top to the bottom. But what if we have different fonts and sizes throughout the text? To help the computer, detection feature needs to be introduced. Detection feature or intelligent character recognition (ICR) is used to identify characters’ traits. It searches for the letters that meet the specified requirements. For example: if you see two angled lines that meet in a point at the top and there’s a horizontal line between them about halfway down, that’s the letter A. Majority of OCR software uses a detection feature, rather than a pattern recognition, to find the letters on images. Some of them use machine learning to teach the software how to recognize the characteristics of the letters. OCR implementation on Android Google Firebase ML Kit is a set of the tools which helps to implement machine learning on Android and iOS — OCR is one of them. It’s relatively easy to start using machine learning. ML Kit has some built-in modules that enable text recognition, face detection, barcode scanning and more. If you’re experienced in neural networks and want to use more sophisticated or specialized ML, you can use custom Tensorflow models. ML Kit has two versions: on-device and cloud. You’ll find the differences and all the features of both versions . We’ll focus on the Android on-device version below. here Before we start, we need to create the Firebase project in the Firebase Console. Tutorial can be found . It requires the knowledge of Kotlin programming language and RxJava2. here Now, let’s add the Firebase ML Kit module in and gradle dependency. AndroidManifest.xml With this setup we can start implementing our text detector. We need to create . FirebaseVisionTextDetector Now, we have the instance of Vision detector which is used to detect the text on the images. To do that, we use: This method takes instance of as a parameter and produces . When task is ready, we can grab . It contains the data about the detected text and the bounding boxes of the detected areas. FirebaseVisionImage Task<FirebaseVisionText> FirebaseVisionText You can create from a bitmap, using a method below: FirebaseVisionImage There are other factory methods to create FirebaseVisionImage. We can check them in Firebase documentation. For now, we’ll use a bitmap version. Below I’ve implemented the full detector class. I’ve used RxJava2 to process input and output of the text detector. I also wrapped Firebase class in to detect the text on RxJava stream. Task<T> Flowable Full class: TextDetector Important points in the class above are and functions. First one is an input point and the other is an output for our detections which you can listen to. processImage observeDetections Now, we need to draw detections on the scanned image. All the bounding boxes come from the object. FirebaseVisionText contains blocks, lines and elements. Blocks are the largest areas of the text, each block has lines and all the lines have elements. FirebaseVisionText Knowing this, we can draw all these elements on our input bitmap. To do that, we need to gather all the bounding boxes for each unit and then draw rectangles on a bitmap. Below, there’s a complete snippet: Output code will look like this: Blue border represents the block, green represents the line and white represents the element. Pretty much all the text was found. Testing the text recognition on receipts example I decided to test three receipts and check how Google’s text recognition will handle them. Each receipt was in different language: Polish, Spanish and German. I’m unable to test languages different than Latin-based, because on-device version doesn’t support them. To test languages like Greek or Russian, the cloud version is required. The first receipt was in Polish. Below, we can see two images. Text highlighted on the left image shows what have been detected by ML Kit. On the right image there’s a data returned by API, drawn on white background. It seems pretty much the same as on the original image. Of course, there were some issues with formatting. Also some letters weren’t detected or were confused. Besides that, we can see that the results were rather good. I aligned all the lines vertically and adjusted the text size to the boxes, what you can see below. Without these corrections there was much more mess. The second test was performed on the Spanish receipt. This one was in low resolution (225 x 335px). As we can see, detector found only two blocks on the entire image. And the last attempt was on the Swiss receipt in German. Detection was almost faultless. Whole text was found, except “e-mail” at the bottom of the receipt. Detector only found last letter of “email” word and assumed it’s 1 (number one). Summary I’ve presented you the overview of OCR basics. I also showed the OCR implementation on Android using Google’s ML Kit. Implementation of ML Kit is rather simple and doesn’t need that much coding. When using an on-device version, detection is limited to the Latin-based languages. Scanned images must have a decent resolution to get good results. Detector doesn’t recognize some of the letters or confuses them. Also, there are some problems with the text written vertically. To get better results, cloud version, other specialized OCR software or custom Tensorflow model are required. On-device text recognition can be used to detect keywords or some simple information from larger text rather than extended articles. As I’ve mentioned earlier, OCR is nothing new at all. But introduction of machine learning within this technology may significantly improve it. In the nearest future we may witness extended, smart OCR implementation, version 2.0. Who knows? The article was written by Łukasz Gawron and was first published on The Software House Blog . Visit the blog for more articles on best development practices and software outsourcing tips.

Simple OCR implementation on Android with Google’s ML Kit

W hen you work on a project, sooner or later you’ll have to present your results to the client. It goes without saying that you’ll be updating files, services or schemas in the database, which means only one thing — deployment time! For many programmers, this process can be stressful. There are times when the service is down, the database falls apart, or a migration goes wrong. Clients don’t make our lives easier either. They would like the deploy to run problem-free and take as little time as possible. Ideally, it should run unnoticed by users. Unfortunately, the conditions may vary, and the deployment of subsequent versions can take quite a long time. It can also cause a temporary downtime for the users. In such cases, we can always ask the DevOps team for help. However, they are usually very busy and can’t guarantee to rebuild the whole deployment process on the spot. However, we can introduce a few changes to the project to shorten the deploy time as well as the application downtime. Below are some concepts and solutions that every developer should be able to smoothly adopt for their project. Back in time — deployment then and now It’s almost certain that a vast majority of programmers remember the beginnings of their careers and their first deploys. When we worked on a small project ourselves, we created an application entirely on our machine. We attached or built libraries, downloaded various types of resources (images, fonts, styles) and sent the ready application to the server using an FTP client. So, most of the preparations were performed locally. With the technology development and new standards creation, the way projects are deployed also changed. Now, in most cases, the developer logs in remotely on the production/test server, downloads the current version of the project from the repository and then launches the application building process. The result is a complete application with the necessary dependencies. It’s clear that the whole process has been moved to a remote machine, which allows us to automate the process and promotes easier management. Faster frontend deployment using building tools Building a frontend application most often looks as follows: Clean a folder with the current application build Run the bundling task Remove unused code Translate the application so that it can work on various browsers Load environmental variables Compress and minify the code to obtain the smallest possible files Copy additional assets Done! The time needed to build an entire application poses a significant problem. For a large project, you can count it in minutes. Since you clean the folder with the current build (you want to get rid of old and unnecessary files), users lose access to your application. In order to avoid this, you can build the application in a folder different than the one served to clients and move the files there at the very end. This solution reduces the time when the application is unavailable to clients, but it has two significant problems: The files are duplicated. When you want to return to the previous version, you lose the data. Instead of copying the files, you can create symbolic links and keep the next builds in separate folders with tags or timestamps. Example task with linking If necessary, a rollback to a previous build will only require linking files from another folder. The last thing to remember is that the symbolic links must be relative, and the build folder should also be available on the server. Path example To avoid problems with the browser’s cache, it’s also advisable to have a random hash assigned to the files. Backend deployment HAProxy For quite a long time, all applications in TSH have been based on the Docker containerization. It increases the flexibility of the project by allowing us to change various elements of our applications easily. However, in order to replace some elements in a way that is invisible to users, you need to extend your architecture with a load balancer. In our case, the balancer will redirect traffic between old and updated containers. HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) will suit our needs perfectly. Setup is as easy as just adding a few lines to our docker compose file. API update To a large degree, backend actualization comes down to building a new container for the current API version and redirecting all traffic from one container to another. With HAProxy, the whole process becomes virtually seamless. Still, let’s systematize our knowledge in this area. On the server, you have launched the API v1 version connected to LB (load balancer — here: HAProxy). You build an API container and add it to the already-launched containers. To do this, you have to use the command, and the HAProxy itself will add it to the configuration and redirect traffic to it (by default, the traffic is distributed evenly over all containers in the configuration). v2 docker-compose scale api=2 Now, the only thing left to do is to remove the v1 version and redirect all traffic to v2. Unfortunately, changing the API scaling to 1 will remove the container that was added last — i.e., your current API version. You must, therefore, remember to stop and remove the old container before you change the scale. This problem can be solved with a simple bash script. deploy.sh After the script has been executed, only the api v2 container will stay active, with all traffic directed to it. Database The last element to be discussed here is the database. Depending on what you want to change, it may be one of the simplest or most challenging element of the system. To ensure that this procedure will run without any problems some simple concepts are presented below. Also, it is worth mentioning that you should modify the API gradually, alternating with the database. Adding a new column Create a migration to add a new column. Deploy the code with the migration. Upload new the API version that is using the new column. Removing a column Modify the code not to use the selected column. Prepare a migration for obsolete column adding a meaningful suffix, such as _deprecated: If the new functionality works and you’re sure you will no longer need the data, you can delete the column. If you come across a problem, you can rollback database easily by removing the suffix. Changing a column name Prepare a migration that creates a column with a new name. Add an event that ensures the updated data is copied to the newly-created column. Migrate the data from the old column to the new one (it’s best to divide records into parts). Modify the code to use only the new column. Remove the old column (see the example above). Changing a column type Create a migration that contains a new column of a different type. Add a suffix with the column type to the name so that it’s easier to distinguish between them . name_column_type Add an event that ensures the updated data is copied to the newly-created column. Migrate the data from the old column to the new one. In the model, enter the name of the new column type. (Compatibility is important here so lets make our model “smart”. If you don’t find the column , use the original column name. In the Doctrine the columns can be obtained using Schema-Manager). name_column_type Create a migration that adds the suffix to the original column and remove the type suffix from the new one. _deprecated Remove column name guessing logic from the model. Remove the old column (see the example above). Looking at the examples above, you can see that well-thought-out migrations allow us to update/modify the database in a way virtually invisible to users. In the end In conclusion, a relatively small amount of work can significantly shorten your deploy time. Of course, the process requires some preparation, caution, and discipline in its implementation. But, in the end, it equals less stress and more satisfied clients. Also worth reading: Bastien Libersa on his blog Slava Korolev on Medium The article was written by Paweł Rychlewski and was first published on The Software House Blog . Visit the blog for more articles on best development practices and software outsourcing tips.

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201-500 employees

Since 2012

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THE SOFTWARE HOUSE

EVERGREEN INDEX #10281

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