Attention: This article was published over 2 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. While some topics are evergreen, technology moves fast, so please keep that in mind as you read the post.Creating RESTful APIs with Spring Boot is a straightforward process, making it a popular choice for a variety of applications, from UI to batch …
In past blogs, I have discussed development containers (dev containers) in detail, from explaining their general mechanics to showing how they can bolster a team’s build automation. As a brief recap for the uninitiated: dev containers are a way of encapsulating a developer’s setup into a container, typically a Docker container. As a practical example, rather than forcing a new teammate to manually install and configure all the necessary tooling before contributing to a project, they can leverage a team’s devcontainer.json definition file to quickly spin up a fully configured development environment.
Microsoft has championed this workflow over the past few years, offering tight integration with tools like VS Code and Codespaces to make containerized development as seamless as possible. At the time of writing, the developer experience has reached a point where I honestly prefer to operate within a dev container for certain types of projects. When I open a team’s codebase within VS Code and it informs me that they have provided a dev container to use, I have higher confidence that I’ll be using the same versions of their tools and seeing the behaviors that they expect.
I’ve even come to trust these setups more than an equivalent set of Dockerfiles or docker-compose scripts, just because the simplicity of the ecosystem makes it more likely that everything is well-maintained and configured correctly. It’s easy to see how these standardization and automation benefits can be a huge boost to teams…once they’ve adopted the right tools to integrate with them.
But what if you don’t want to use VS Code?
This year, the client I work with has started exploring the offerings in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) after investing years into the Microsoft Azure cloud. The opportunity has allowed me to explore a few new technologies that this post will cover and that you will hopefully find interesting.
In short, I was tasked with transforming Pub/Sub to Firestore Database in GCP. The scenario explored in this post takes an FHIR healthcare data feed, extracts telephone and email information, and then stores that in a Firestore database.
Client Snapshot: National less-than-truckload (LTL) transportation company headquartered in the Midwest Project Snapshot A team of Keyhole consultants joined the client’s team of engineers to develop a customized front-end software application that improved user experience. This was an initiative to modernize a legacy user interface and move to a web-based UI that replicated existing functionality. Although the previous application was …
As a frontend developer, have you ever found yourself in a situation where the backend didn’t have a RESTful API that you could call to test out your user interface? Have you ever wanted to prototype an idea and found yourself getting down in the weeds setting up RESTful routes in a mock backend server?
That’s where json-server comes to the rescue!
With json-server, you simply create a JSON file that follows json-server’s conventions, and you can have a mock RESTful server up in no time. This blog post will go over the features of json-server that I have found most useful as a frontend developer.