Temporal .NET SDK and Workflows for Enterprise Apps

Temporal.IO and Workflows in Enterprise Applications

Zach Gardner .NET, Architecture, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Microservices, Python Leave a Comment

In every software application I’ve ever worked on, no matter the industry or maturity of the team or number of weeks in a sprint, there have been three questions that always come up: What is the best way to center a

?

? Should we use tabs or spaces? How should we implement complex workflows?

It was with that third question in mind that I stumbled upon a link in HackerNews a few weeks back on Temporal.io announcing that its .NET SDK is now in alpha.

If you aren’t in the know, Temporal is a library that lets you describe workflows as code. It’s available in multiple languages, but the Python flavor is the most popular.

So, I took a leap of faith, tried out the Temporal .NET SDK, and decided to recap my thoughts for you all as a blog. I’ll walk through, at a high level, what the Temporal approach is, the implications of workflows at the different zones of enterprise architecture, and where I see Temporal being useful in a large organization’s software strategy.

3D Geospatial Rendering with Cesium

CesiumJS 3D Geospatial Rendering

Lou Mauget Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Programming, Tutorial Leave a Comment

This blog is a brief overview of CesiumJS, a cool JavaScript client library for visualizing a geospatial Earth map, including artifacts (both real and generated). They eat their own dog food, so their homepage has a declaratively-rendered spinning globe by Cesium.

CesiumJS has a higher-level Entity API as well as a lower-level Primitive API. The API doc can be found here. I’ll point out a couple of interactive source examples that use the entity API; most Cesium apps use it. Cesium also provides open specification 3D Tiles to load, render, and cache on-demand terrain features, artifacts, and building renditions for surface viewing.

There is no IDE or download needed to interact with the material mentioned in this overview. You can interact with the material mentioned with your browser.

tRPC: Building type-safe APIs with TypeScript

tRPC: Building Type-Safe APIs with TypeScript

Jake Everhart API Development, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, GraphQL, JavaScript, TypeScript Leave a Comment

Over the years, we’ve seen many approaches to HTTP API design. While REST APIs are still very popular throughout the industry, they offer no inherent guarantees that the client’s assumptions about the response structures will be valid.

GraphQL fills this gap to an extent by allowing client-side code greater control over the resulting structures but at the cost of added complexity. RPC (remote procedure call) frameworks attempt a different solution by sharing generated type definitions between the client and server implementations. What if there was a way to achieve the type safety of RPC by simply inferring the type definitions from the server’s code?

Enter tRPC. Since JavaScript (and specifically TypeScript) can already span across client and server implementations, tRPC allows a client to directly consume structures defined by the server’s exposed procedures. Essentially, you import your dependencies from the server to access these procedures, their return types are inferred and checked at build time, and your client code can confidently consume the returned data.

In this post, we’ll look at how it achieves these goals and what limitations it places on your project stack.

Transform Pub/Sub to Firestore Database in GCP

Rusty Divine Apache, Articles, Cloud, Data Science, Databases, Google Cloud Platform, Python Leave a Comment

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.