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…

Creating a Slack Bot

Brice McIver Articles, Conversational Apps, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Node.js Leave a Comment

If you have ever worked on a team project, then you’ve needed some way to communicate with your team. For a very small team with all of its members based in one place, face-to-face communication might be your go-to method of handling project conversations.

However, once your project size progresses past that point, there’s a good chance that you’ll at least evaluate using a collaborative software package to help manage your project. Slack is a popular option for this.

In this blog, I’ll show the basic steps you can take to integrate Slack with your existing tools and workflows. In particular, we will set up Slack for incoming webhooks and event subscriptions, showing how to program a Slack bot to say personalized “Welcome to the channel” and a “Goodbye” messages.

Let’s get started…

Building Applications Using the backbone.khs Framework Extension

John Boardman Articles, BackboneJS, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Node.js Leave a Comment

Backbone is a very powerful application development framework. However, it can be a little “close to the metal” in terms of how much work is needed to produce a working application with it. I see Backbone as a low level framework that could use some help in making it a bit easier and faster to use.

Keyhole has released an extension to help! The backbone.khs framework extension npm module (available by clicking the link) does its best to minimize the work necessary to get a Backbone application up and running.

The extension makes it easier to deal with:
• browser history
• root level non-Model Object implementation
• caching
• session support
• regions (which break pages up into more workable segments)
• a top-level Application object to manage the application
• modules to help with page and URL routing
• a Backbone View extension to seamlessly integrate Backbone Stickit and make Marionette templates easier
• a Collection View to enhance working with groups of items.

In this blog, I’ll describe these enhancements with some code examples…

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Making Regular Expressions Simple With VerbalExpressions

Chris Berry Articles, JavaScript, Tutorial Leave a Comment

Regular expressions are not the easiest thing in the world to quickly understand. Most developers only work with regular expressions when they really, really have to.

But what if there was another way?

There is and it’s called VerbalExpressions. VerbalExpressions is a collection of over two dozen repositories and libraries that use plain and simple language to describe a regular expression. In fact the motto they use is, “Regular Expressions made easy”.

VerbalExpressions is a quick and easy way to write complex regular expressions. In this blog, I will use the VerbalExpressions JavaScript implementation as my library of choice to demonstrate this great tool to you.