UX design is crucial to just about everything. It renders the latest technology accessible to the masses, makes our apps and websites a pleasure to use, and determines which brands and products we return to over and over again. To put it simply, design matters. 

Alfred Finder is a web application, React-based, that allows you to quickly find documents on an Alfresco back-end, preview them, and process metadata. When customers use software, most of the time, they don’t think about the choices that are behind its development of it.

Last year, we demonstrated what Alfred Finder looks like and how it’s easy to find and retrieve documents and information.

In the third article of this blog series, Jasper Hilven, Software Engineer at Xenit, explained how to:

1. Manage complexity to keep things simple and to get things done fast,
2. Ensure quality at multiple levels.

Managing Complexity 

As Google Trends reveal, Angular and React are two of the most popular web technologies in 2018.

Angular has more search hits than React however, it does not necessarily mean that one is better than the other. But this indicates what people find interesting, whatever the reason may be. It’s important to be aware that people may exchange keywords such as AngularJS or Angular, thus leading to higher search hits.

React has a time-to-market advantage since it was released 3 years prior to Angular. And that means it has faced lots of real-world problems, gone through critical tests, and overall has developed into an adaptable and flexible frontend library that many love. (“A comparison between Angular and React and their core languages“).

As we already mentioned, Alfred Finder is React-based and this choice is a logical consequence of keeping things simple. Jasper shared his approach and tips on building the UI of the application.

 Ensuring quality

 “You need to find a balance between getting things done and ensuring quality”, Jasper claims. In the Alfred Finder team, we are focusing more on:

• Quality of the code

At Xenit, we use Typescript to type-check every single line of code. The cost of these checks is rather low, and it happens each time you write a single line of code. We also use a Linter for style checking. It’s called Typescript Linter. This is very useful if you have multiple people working on the same project. ” 

• Quality of the components

Components are the building block of software. We use unit tests to test our components. As soon as somebody breaks a component, a test complains about it. Then we can fix the issue long before the customer notices anything. “It’s like having a machine that checks all the bricks each time again and again before you are even building your house.”

• Quality of checks

We automatically run (almost) everything a user can do, each time we change something. Jenkins runs all these tests and keeps all the reports of all the performed tests. In this way, we are not only delivering a product, but we are also delivering quality and value.

A 30-day free trial of Alfred Finder is available. You can experience the new Alfresco searching interface, personalize the layout, preview information, and edit metadata.