Getting to Know Custom CSS Properties

Lawrence Chabela Articles, CSS & HTML, Development Technologies & Tools 1 Comment

CSS custom properties are very powerful way for you to spice up your style sheets. They are a way to separate JavaScript behavior and styling, as shown in the ability to set information in the JavaScript for the CSS to use for its styling.

Even if you’re using a preprocessor for your CSS, there is still a place for CSS custom properties to be directly embedded in your CSS.

In this blog: we introduce custom CSS properties, show why you want to use them, how to define them, and how to change them with and without JavaScript.

An Example Progressive Web App on Android

RJ Dela-Cruz Angular, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Mobile 6 Comments

In my experience, the best way to learn a new technology is to create something tangible with it. I recently sought out to learn Angular and Angular Material. So, I developed an experimental Angular app that uses omdbapi to query Movie Posters. It’s aptly named Movie Poster Finder.

Developing the Movie Poster Finder application, I ran into a thing called PWA, which is also known as Progressive Web Applications. I thought it was really neat that both Android and mobile Chrome treat them as native applications.

In this post, I will show an example Progressive Web Application in action, explaining what I encountered when turning an experimental Angular web application into a PWA.

React v16.0 Release Overview and Migration

Luke Curran Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, React Leave a Comment

React v16.0 was released by Facebook on Tuesday, September 26th. This version introduces performance boosts and other very helpful features.

React 16 brings some significant internal changes features to the table. In my opinion, one of the most interesting thing about this release is that React has been rewritten. Luckily, in terms of upgrading, if your app runs in 15.6 without any warnings, it should work in 16 (with minor exceptions).

In this blog I highlight some of the new features introduced in React v16.0, in addition to demonstrating how to update your current React applications to v16.0 using a Keyhole open source application for reference…

Using Docker + AWS to Build, Deploy and Scale your App

Brandon Klimek Articles, AWS, Cloud, DevOps, Docker, Python, Spring, Spring Boot, Tutorial 8 Comments

I recently worked to develop a software platform that relied on Spring Boot and Docker to prop up an API. Being the only developer on the project, I needed to find a way to quickly and efficiently deploy new releases. However, I found many solutions overwhelming to set up.

That was until I discovered AWS has tools that allow any developer to quickly build and deploy their application.

In this 30 minute tutorial, you will discover how to utilize the following technologies:
– AWS CodeCommit – source control (git)
– AWS Code Build – source code compiler, rest runner
– AWS Codepipeline – builds, tests, and deploys code every time the repo changes
-AWS Elastic Beanstalk – service to manage EC2 instances handling deployments, provisioning, load balancing, and health monitoring
-Docker + Spring Boot – Our containerized Spring Boot application for the demo

Once finished, you will have a Docker application running that automatically builds your software on commit, and deploys it to the Elastic beanstalk sitting behind a load balancer for scalability. This continuous integration pipeline will allow you to worry less about your deployments and get back to focusing on feature development within your application.

Modernization Lessons: FTP & the Mainframe

Clayton Neff Articles, COBOL, Consulting, Development Technologies & Tools, Java, Modernization, Programming, Spring Batch 1 Comment

One of my most recent projects involved helping a client move many decades of code from a mainframe environment to a distributed Java web environment. The client had engaged another company to actually transform the mainframe code to Java, and our team was tasked with making it all actually work.

One of the major areas we had to deal with was the transition of all of the batch processes. Of course, Spring Batch came to our rescue for most of the work, and was an easy choice as we were already using Spring Boot to wrapper the converted applications.

The most challenging part of the entire project was that the client did not want to move everything at once in a Big Bang, but rather a few programs as a time. This meant that some programs would be running in the Java environment while others remained on the mainframe.

In this blog, I discuss three data challenges we encountered in the transition of an enterprise mainframe to Java web application with Spring Batch, how we overcame them, and tips to keep in mind going forward when in similar migration situations.