The secret to Forever Young applications: the Rappit Developer approach to managing library versions

How often does this happen to businesses?

After investing a lot of time in building their enterprise applications, and following months of effort in development and testing, the apps have finally gone live successfully. In the following months, new releases are launched. Just when everything seems to be going well, the tools and libraries used in the applications become outdated, and have to be updated again.

At first glance, it might seem like a simple task. Just a click of a button to update, and it’s done!

But is it that simple?

In reality, it’s not. Newer libraries often break backward compatibility, and the application code requires changes to adapt to that! This leads to investigating the newer libraries and checking their compatibility with the existing source code and a complete retest of the application. These changes and verifications can take several days of effort. Which will, in turn, delay new features that the business users are waiting for.

What becomes a priority?

In most cases, businesses focus on their impactful features, and those features become a priority. Therefore, the developers continue to evolve the application on outdated libraries. Over time, this creates technical debt and more vulnerabilities. Inevitably, there comes a time when the application becomes too burdened with technical debts that it has to be completely rebuilt from scratch.

Over the past few decades, we have seen this problem occur repeatedly with our customers.

One of our major strategic customers had several thousand users for each of their dozens of internal applications. As part of their overall approach, they chose to build rather than buy their applications. This decision was driven primarily by return on investment: by building in-house, they typically recovered their investment within the first 2–3 years. In contrast, the recurring annual license fees for thousands of users over an application lifecycle of 6 to 10+ years would have been significantly higher. This was a very financially effective strategy, along with other benefits such as being very customized for their specific needs and deep integration with their existing applications.

However, while this strategy was effective, after the initial 3-4 years of development, an unexpected cost emerged… Many of the libraries their applications depended on had become outdated.

In some cases, this meant a complete rebuild was necessary. For example, some of their applications were built on Angular 1.0, but in a few years, Angular 2.0 was released, which had a fundamentally different framework, making simple upgrades impossible. The application user interface had to be rebuilt from scratch using Angular 2.0, which was the standard at that time.

This challenge is common across many organizations and technologies, including versions of Java, Spring, open source libraries, Angular, PrimeNG, etc.

The prevalence, benefits, and risks of open-source libraries

Benefits
Open source libraries are widely used in building enterprise business applications, as they offer several significant advantages, including lower costs, a huge volume of readily available features, faster development and time to market, easier to find engineering resources familiar with the popular Open Source libraries, etc.

Risks
However, these benefits do not come without risks. Due to the business-driven priorities and both budget as well as people-related constraints, many organizations do not update the libraries in their codebase regularly. A study shows that 91% of commercial applications contain outdated or abandoned open source components, which can pose serious risks to the business.

The challenges with outdated libraries
Using outdated libraries in enterprise software applications introduces a range of significant challenges, impacting security, performance, and overall maintainability. The 7 key issues include:

1. Security Vulnerabilities
   • Increased risk of exploitation:
     Older libraries often contain known vulnerabilities that have been discovered and patched in newer versions. Attackers actively target these known weaknesses, making your applications susceptible to breaches.
   • Lack of security updates:
     Outdated libraries typically no longer receive security updates, leaving them permanently exposed to newly discovered threats.

2. Compatibility issues

• • Integration problems:
    Older libraries may not be compatible with newer operating systems, databases, or other software components. This can lead to integration problems and system instability.
  • Dependency conflicts:
    Upgrading other parts of your system may create conflicts with outdated libraries, leading to unexpected errors.

3. Maintenance and support
   • Increased maintenance costs:
     Maintaining code that relies on outdated libraries can be difficult and expensive. Developers may struggle to understand or modify the code, and finding support for older libraries can be challenging.
   • Scarcity of expertise:
     As technologies evolve, developers with expertise in older libraries become increasingly scarce. This can make it difficult to find qualified personnel to maintain your applications.

4. Performance degradation
   • Lack of performance improvements:
     Newer versions of libraries often include performance optimizations, bug fixes, and new features that you’re missing out on. Outdated libraries can slow down your applications and reduce their efficiency.

5. Compliance and regulatory issues
   • Failure to meet standards:
     Many industries have compliance and regulatory requirements that mandate the use of up-to-date software. Using outdated libraries can put your organization at risk of non-compliance.

6. Hindered innovation
   • Limited feature development:
     Outdated libraries can restrict your ability to implement new features or integrate with modern technologies. This can stifle innovation and put your organization at a competitive disadvantage.

7. Increased technical debt
   • Accumulated rework:
     Using outdated libraries creates technical debt, which is the cost of future rework required to fix the problems caused by short-term solutions. This debt can accumulate over time, making it increasingly difficult and expensive to modernize your applications.

In essence, relying on outdated libraries creates a cascade of problems that can significantly impact the security, stability, and long-term viability of your enterprise software applications.

Many organizations are aware of the risk and continue operating in the same situation due to all sorts of real-world constraints, and worse still are that many organizations are not even aware of the significant security risks in their applications and their fallouts if their vulnerabilities get exploited.

How does Rappit help address this?

Rappit Developer is an application modernization and code generation platform that generates code for the application as designed using the Rappit Designer. One of the key pillars of Rappit Developer is that it helps the application code to be “Forever young”.

This means Rappit Developer regularly releases support for the latest versions of the libraries periodically. When the application code is generated, it is automatically regenerated using the latest versions of the libraries. This ensures that customer application developers have very little effort or cognitive load in adapting to the latest version of libraries. Developers only need to focus on the custom code they’ve written and on the smoke testing of the application.

This automatic regeneration of the application source code in the upgraded versions of the libraries helps keep the source code ‘forever young’ and never become a ‘legacy’ again. Hence it helps customer teams tremendously, saving time and effort, allowing them to be on secure libraries, and ensures they can maintain the source code better, and to completely focus their time and budget on new features that are functionally needed for the business, rather than on the technical aspects of keeping the code up-to-date.

Rappit Developer – Moving to the latest Java and Angular versions

This month, Rappit Developer has made the latest product release, in which support is upgraded to Java 19 and the related Spring and open source libraries to address the 45+ vulnerabilities discovered in periodic security scans on the older libraries. While the upgrade from Java 17 to 19 itself doesn’t have backward compatibility issues, some of the open-source libraries used, do. With this release, customer applications can now regenerate their code using the latest library versions, automatically resolving those security vulnerabilities.

Customer application development teams only need to perform a quick smoke test, which can be integrated with their regular release testing to save time and effort.

We are also in the process of supporting the migration of apps automatically from Angular 15 to Angular 19 / PrimeNG 19. This means Rappit Developer continues to support its “forever young” principle for both the backend and frontend libraries.

This has major benefits for customers, as without much effort, their code remains “young”, and runs on the latest versions of libraries, their security vulnerabilities and all other known issues of staying in the outdated versions of libraries are addressed and customers can focus their time and budget on more innovations of their applications instead of addressing technical debts.

These are just some of the reasons why it is better to build applications on code generation frameworks like Rappit Developer, instead of doing the coding “from scratch” via the traditional methods.

The approach of some ‘model’ based low-code/no-code platforms

Also, it is important that the productivity improvement low-code/no-code (LCNC) platforms used by customers allow them to move to the latest versions of the framework mostly automatically, rather than requiring customer teams to spend significant time and effort upgrading. Some LCNC platforms, which are usually “model” based, when upgraded, force customers to upgrade to the latest platform version, which itself takes several weeks or months. This again has been a big pain point for the customers of such platforms. Platforms shouldn’t make things so difficult for their customers’ teams.

That’s another major advantage of using Rappit Developer: it does not force customers to immediately move to the latest version of the libraries. They can move their applications at their own pace so that they have the flexibility to properly plan the upgrade to the latest libraries based on the project priorities.

How Rappit Developer differs – eternal youth for your code

Rappit Developer, which is not a model based platform but an “application modernization & code generation” platform for core system development, provides the customer with independence from the platform, complete flexibility for developers to add custom code, and also, provides such largely automatic upgrades to the latest libraries, and thereby addressing the pain points faced by business teams, CIOs, project managers and developers.