In the 22.0 release of Instant Developer Cloud you’ll find loads of improvements designed to boost performance for your development team and applications.
Let’s take a look which ones are most important.
PostgreSQL, Node and one more version
2022 is the year of the updates to the most important basic application servers for Instant Developer Cloud.
PostgreSQL is updated to version 13 LTS, and Node.js is moving to version 16 LTS.
Therefore, as indicated by the LTS specifications, we have two versions that will be maintained for a long time.
These updates require a corresponding update in the Instant Developer Cloud development servers and production servers. This update will not be reversible.
For this reason, between versions 22.0 and 22.5 (the latter is slated for July), an intermediate version will be released (22.1). In fact, while 22.0 is still running on existing servers, for 22.1 the servers themselves will be updated.
This will all be automated and we will explain this important step in a webinar.
As all software development professionals know, updates and improvements are always preferable to sticking with the status quo. The world changes, and new functionalities arise. Falling behind is a mistake.
On the other hand, change is difficult, sometimes painful, and undoubtedly always full of unknowns. Will the system work like it did before? And if there are problems will I be able to identify them? Can I go back?
But for us, updates and improvements are always better, so we’re making them. And the people who use our systems can forget all these concerns: we’ll take care of the problems and check that everything works as before.
To explain the difficulty in achieving this result without Instant Developer and the enormous advantage of achieving it in a way that’s automated for users, I’ll give you a concrete example.
Installing a new version of PostgreSQL and migrating all the data is incredibly complex. Doing it with Docker (as in our case) brings additional significant complications. The providers of PostgreSQL don’t give solutions, much less automated ones, leaving the user with the whole responsibility of figuring out how to update correctly.
In terms of Node.js, the automatic update to version 16 LTS brings with it important performance and security improvements, but that’s not all. In fact, with the switch to the new version all the packages (hundreds of them) on which the developed applications are based will be updated, and purged of breaking changes.
An extract of the new features
I’ll wrap up with a summary of the most important updates and the benefits they provide:
Case-insensitive sorting in queries: you can use an attribute to decide whether to use case-sensitive or case-insensitive sorting to automatically manage data lists that contain mixed-case data.
Mask management for input type elements: you can guide users in a more refined way when they enter data in order to avoid errors.
New types of user interface that will adapt the display to the new iOS standards, such as highlighted headers and partial pop-up views.
Acceleration of the Virtual DOM up to 10x. Virtual DOM views will be rendered much more quickly, with immediate effect on the usability of applications.
Automatic controls on server disk space to avoid the most common cases of servers filling.
A new file manager in the console with the same management style and effectiveness of the Mac Finder.
Acceleration of offline access to device databases. The increase in speed is considerable, up to ten times faster.
Now it’s your turn – start now!
