Using Off-The Shelf Components for Web Projects

Writing less code and creating better apps is the ultimate goal for any company, building software and digital product. The fact is that many software companies are not approaching applications design, thinking in a scalable way. Using off-the-shelf components for web projects can help teams to avoid double-work and create sustainable technical architecture, saving time and costs.

In this article we will refer to “components’ as standalone, discrete piece of software with high level of functionality, that is accessible via an API and covers wide range of business cases. Off-the-shelf third party libraries with components that integrate with software projects, can greatly facilitate the development process for both large and small teams in a number of ways.

1. Reusability

Building a web project with components allows for their reuse in future development cycles. Since technology is always changing this is priceless. One of the obstacles with other development types is that they are not built internally and include many dependencies. If you build your application in a componentized format, then the best components can be swapped in and out, keeping the application architecture up to date over time instead of rebuilding it from zero.

2. Accelerated Development

Components are hosted in a library that can be accessed, integrated and modified throughout the process of development. Imagine that you were developing a financial application that requires a listing of positions by asset class. You can pull the applicable grid component from the component library and quickly integrate it into the project. The developer need not to worry about the service signature or how to create the logic for the table.

3. Optimized Requirements & Design Process

By using third party libraries with components, the product managers and business analysts can reduce the needed time to define the application functionality and user experience. As they work through the definition process, they can reference a component as the baseline for the requirement and then only elaborate on the required extensions and business logic. The API architecture is built to make easy modifications of the default component behavior in order to handle more specific situations not covered by the configurable behavior.

Companies with libraries of solid reusable components are able to shorten production and delivery time, using less code and dedicating more resources to quality assurance and testing.