Front-end applications are becoming ever bigger and more complex. It is not uncommon for a React app to have hundreds or even thousands of components. As the project size increases, build times become increasingly important. In large projects, you may have to wait up to a minute for the code…
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UI designers and front-end developers are tasked with creating clean and consistent user interfaces. At the same time, testing is a cornerstone of software development. Each part of a software project is tested individually and isolated from the other elements in unit tests. This practice has been challenging to achieve…
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Over the past five years, GraphQL has established itself as the most popular alternative to REST APIs. GraphQL has several advantages over traditional REST-based services. First of all, GraphQL makes the query schema available to the clients. A client that reads the schema immediately knows what services are available on…
Read moreThe HTTP protocol powers the web. Traditionally, HTTP is a request-response protocol. This means that a client requests data from a server, and the server responds to that request. In this model, a server will never send data to a client without having been queried first.
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Almost any web app needs some sort of access control, usually implemented by user login. Choosing how user authentication is implemented depends on the type of application and its audience. In this post, I want to show you a few different ways of creating a login feature in a single-page…
Read moreIf you have been developing React applications, then you probably know that there are two ways of creating React components. You can create a component class that extends from React.Component. You then have to implement specific methods such as render() that renders the component. The alternative is to create a…
Read moreDo you remember the days when people used tables to arrange content on websites? HTML tables were ideal for arranging content in a grid-style layout. But they had a serious problem. They mixed content with style, prohibited semantic markup, and made it hard for screen readers to sort the information…
Read moreVue lets you create complex and high-performance web applications. As a front-end JavaScript framework, it's becoming more popular than ever. Vue Router is the official router for Vue. It facilitates routing in single-page applications, and provides a way to process user authentications and restrict page access. Combined with Okta, implementing…
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When you create React applications, at some point you have to make a decision on how to organize your CSS styles. For larger applications, you'll have to modularize the stylesheets. Tools such as Sass and Less let you divide up your styles into separate files and provide lots of other…
Read moreOver the last year or so, a new buzzword started floating around Angular forums and blogs. The word was Ivy. Ivy promises to make your application faster and smaller. But what exactly does this new technology do?
Read moreUsability is a key aspect to consider when creating a web application, and that means designing a clean, easy-to-understand user interface. Leveraging common design languages can help make that goal a reality with their recognizable components that many users will understand right away. However, unlike desktop apps where the operating…
Read moreWhen you are developing web applications with React, you know that writing the JavaScript code is only half of the story. The other half is implementing the design using style sheets. When your application becomes larger, using plain CSS style sheets can become tedious and unmaintainable. Sass is one of…
Read moreIf you're a frontend dev in the world today you've probably heard of (and possibly even used) webpack. The Angular build process uses webpack behind the scenes to transpile TypeScript to JavaScript, transform Sass files to CSS, and many other tasks. To understand the importance of this build tool, it…
Read moreWhen you develop a new web application, you most likely split the application into two parts. The server-side provides access control and data persistence, while the client-side is mostly presentational. The two parts have to communicate, and your first idea may be to implement a REST API. However, a number…
Read moreMongoDB is often the first suggestion when it comes time to select a NoSQL database. But what is a NoSQL database, and why would you want to use one in the first place? To answer this question, let's step back and look at SQL databases and where they shine. SQL…
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The MySQL database has been a reliable workhorse for web applications for many years. It is the M in the LAMP stack, and powers a huge number of web servers across the world.
Read moreWith the ever-increasing use of mobile devices over the last few years it has become more and more important for web developers to anticipate the need for users on these devices. The first step was the ability to cater for different screen sizes, thus creating the need for responsive user…
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User registration and authentication are one of the features that almost no web application can do without. Authentication usually consists of a user entering using a username and a password and then being granted access to various resources or services. Authentication, by its very nature, relies on keeping the state…
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When designing software with a user interface, it is important to structure the code in a way that makes it easy to extend and maintain. Over time, there have been a few approaches in separating out responsibilities of the different components of an application. Although there is plenty of literature…
Read moreSo, you have been learning all about web technologies including JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. The advantage of web technologies is, of course, that the same software can be used on many different platforms. But this advantage comes with a number of problems. Web applications have to be run inside a…
Read moreStorage as a Service (SaaS) is becoming ever more popular with many businesses. The advantages are clear. Instead of maintaining your own backend server you can outsource the service to a different provider. This can result in a significant increase in productivity, as well as a reduction in development and…
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Single page applications (SPAs) are becoming more and more popular. Their appeal is obvious. Fast loading times gives users the feeling of responsiveness even over slow networks. At some point, a developer of a SPA has to think about authentication and authorization. But what do these two terms actually mean?…
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During the last two years, everybody started talking about Progressive Web Applications, or PWAs for short. But what is this new type of application, and how can it make your life as an Angular developer better? To understand what PWAs are all about, and how you can build them in…
Read moreDuring the past 10 years or so, the concept of REST APIs for web services has become the bread and butter for most web developers. Recently a new concept has emerged, GraphQL. GraphQL is a query language that was invented by Facebook and released to the public in 2015. During…
Read moreIn recent years, single page applications (SPAs) have become more and more popular. A SPA is a website that consists of just one page. That lone page acts as a container for a JavaScript application. The JavaScript is responsible for obtaining the content and rendering it within the container. The…
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