Our blog has moved! View this article on our new blog here.

Technology progresses rapidly, and at times, exponentially. This is a great thing, but when it comes to app development, it means spending hours updating apps, keeping them up to date and functional.

The design paradigm that your app is built upon matters. Adding, removing or updating them to evolve with the times can be an easy, challenging, or nearly impossible experience. You get to choose.

So, what are the best ways to build applications which are not only easy to update as technology progresses, but are also adaptable with the foreseeable needs of the future?

There’s a divide in opinion on what actually makes an app future proof. Some say it’s a combination of blockchain technology and decentralized computing, while others claim it’s all about maintainability and an app’s ability to evolve and connect to any technology.

But those two opinions don’t blend well. Blockchains and decentralized computing aren’t known for being easy to maintain, evolve, develop or connect to any technology.

We need a new paradigm that gives us access to the best of all worlds.

Maintainable

For most apps to have enjoyable user experiences, they have to be highly connected to the outside world. And since tech progresses so rapidly, it can be a challenge to keep an application’s external connections up to date.

The popularity and promising future of blockchain technology have put us in a challenging position because getting data to or from blockchains (let alone updating a DApp) is difficult because data is siloed.

On the other hand, popular architectures like monolithic or imperative-microservices are so highly interconnected internally that updates require a significant time investment.

There is a design paradigm, however, that is known for maintainability: it’s called Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). These apps feature no interdependent connectedness. Instead, each service and application simply listens and emits independently, allowing parts to be added, removed or replaced without affecting other parts of the application.

Event-driven microservices are one technology that we can use to build future-proof applications.

Easy to connect to any technology

Technological incompatibilities aren’t future-proof.

There are thousands of programming languages, and new ones could be created each day.

It’s not realistic to expect developers to be educated on all of the languages of each technology they want to use, let alone expecting them to spend valuable time getting each technology to communicate properly within their applications.

Differences in languages are nothing new for our globalized society, but with the help of new tools, we’ve progressed to be able to communicate with any major language.

Since there is no way knowing which technologies or languages will be widely used in the future, it’s essential to keep applications easily compatible with any technology.

Easy to develop

Complicated solutions will always yield to more simple and straightforward ones, as progress tends to move towards effective simplicity.

With new developer tools constantly being introduced, we are seeing unnecessary complexities starting to disappear, allowing for more time to focus on the actual building of applications.

This progress towards simplicity in development is seen in frameworks such as EDA. It’s now possible for applications to be built with a simple configuration file rather than many lines of business logic. Entire applications can be built by writing a simple text file listing all services, events, and tasks; no coding required.

Thanks to EDA’s use of an event bus, acting as a middle man between services and applications, connections to technologies can be shared and reused, eliminating the need to know how to code to build the back ends of applications.

Even advanced programmers with immense developing knowledge can utilize these functionalities to save time and energy, so they can spend more time on product improvement or working on other truly complex issues.

Busy work isn’t future proof.

Ready for Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is the next step in the evolution of the internet.

Among its most important features is the use of blockchain technology for its ability to attach immutable value to digital assets.

Blockchains, however, are not known for maintainability or connectivity to any technology. You only need to spend a moment interacting with the majority of today’s DApps to realize they lack a proper UX, thanks to heavily-siloed data not interacting with external technologies.

A future-proof application must have a clear path to its own decentralization for it to be Web 3.0 compatible.

Blockchain and decentralization will need to become more accessible, maintainable and connectible for them to pave a way into our future.

A platform for future-proofing apps

Both sides are correct. Apps must be easy to maintain and connect and you must be able to quickly update and expand it to allow it to freely evolve. Also, they must be able to fully communicate with blockchains with a route to decentralization.

There hasn’t been a solution that does it all until now. MESG is a framework that includes a network of services, connected by event-driven programming so maintainable, powerful applications can be built easily.

Any technology which sends or receives data can be connected to MESG, including blockchains, and with services connecting to a communal message broker/event bus called Engine, rather than directly to your unique applications, services and applications can be easily shared and reused.

Soon, developing on MESG will get even easier through Workflow, eliminating the need for developers to write any code whatsoever, as long as the services used are available in the Marketplace. Simply list the services you want to use and the events and tasks you’d like, and allow Core to do the assembling for you.

Not only are apps built with MESG already compatible with Web 3.0, but developers can choose the optimal ratio of decentralization for their applications.

MESG combines the best practices known in development paradigms into a single solution, allowing you to create applications that are truly future proof.