The right tools for the job

Whether you are building a web application, a customer database, or just putting together your new IKEA desk – choosing the right tools for the job is very important. At SaaScada we are always mindful of the technologies we include in our engineering process, with a particular focus on agility and adaptability.

In my role as a Senior Architect I work on the SaaScada Portal. One of my favourite parts of that work is utilising modern web frameworks and build tools, because they remove a lot of the complexities that used to exist when building large scale web applications. Modern frameworks like VueJS and React are excellent tools that remove the need for “boiler plate” code and allow engineers to focus on actually building features.

Just like great wine pairs with great food, any core web framework always goes well with a component library. VueJS for example is complemented perfectly with Vuetify because the repeatable tasks like building buttons and lists of items can be completed quickly and to a high design specification.

Why does this matter to you? Our agility means that we can put all of our focus into that shiny new feature that you want for your business, or we can spend our energy working on the next big innovation. Our engineering time is much better spent on changes that actually benefit you instead of churning out more template code – and this means that new features in the SaaScada Portal are built in timescales of days, rather than months.

Another illustration of our speed is deployments, updates to your SaaScada Simulator environment can be completed rapidly because our tools are optimised for agility. On top of our tools SaaScada is a cloud native platform, and combining modern web development practices with a cloud architecture puts us at the front of modern development practices.

Of course, there are times when as an engineer you want to break out of the framework or component library when a feature requires a more bespoke approach. In my experience this comes up more than usual in the FinTech domain because the space is so innovative. For example, in the SaaScada Portal we built a unique timeline feature that displays how the balance on an account matures over its lifetime. This kind of highly customised feature is beyond the standard tools, but in fact it’s the safety and efficiency of modern component libraries that gives us back the time and headspace to build these kinds of domain specific features when we need to.

One final case in point from our most recent release is our new hierarchical structure. This is a huge change that allows multiple Institutions to be connected together under one Parent Institution for Banking as a Service scenarios. This approach means entities can be defined in a single place and inherited down to multiple Institutions without needing to repeatedly define settings over and over. Without the right tools, we simply couldn’t have delivered this kind of functionality in the short timeframe that we have.