Decoding Mobile Development Options

Decoding Mobile Development Options

Mike Cerny Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Mobile, React Native, Xamarin 1 Comment

It can be challenging to decide on the right strategy for reaching the mobile audience, though. If you decide an app is what you need, the next question is “what are my options?” In general terms, the types of mobile applications you could choose to build can be divided into three groups: vendor-native, cross-platform, and hybrid web.

In this post, we give an overview of the various mobile development strategies on our shortlist for enterprise clients to consider; for example, Xamarin, Flutter, React Native, and Ionic. For each tool, we give a brief introduction and highlight the key advantages and disadvantages found in implementing each mobile development approach.

Progressive Web Apps: The Service Worker Demystified

Adrienne Gessler Articles, JavaScript 4 Comments

You can’t read any technology trend news for the upcoming year without reading about Progressive Web Applications (PWA). PWA offers the ability to add native-like capabilities to your web application.

One of the core technologies of a PWA is the service worker, so I thought I would take us through a question and answer session on service workers. Service workers have been around for a while now, but the momentum in their use has picked up with the popularity of PWA. My goal here is for you to be able to understand what a service worker is, what you can do with it, and the limitations of a service worker.

Getting Started with Marble Testing

Todd Leininger Articles, Testing, Tutorial Leave a Comment

When working with RxJS observables, it can get a little tricky to unit test. Sometimes it can be hard to get insight into what is going on with the observable in the test. I’ve personally been frustrated numerous times by trying to test my observables with the subscribe and assert method. This is where marble testing can make testing observables easier.

The main advantage of using marble testing is the marble diagrams. With the diagrams, we have a visual representation of our observables and subscriptions so we can see the interactions between the two. Once the basics are understood, you should be able to get observable tests running in no time.

In this post, I will show you how to get started using Marble testing with an example. By the end, you should have enough information to get started on your journey testing observables. My examples are based on an Angular application using Jasmine, but these can also be applied to different testing frameworks for React and other applications.

More on Accessibility-First Programming

Todd Horn Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Opinion, Programming Leave a Comment

A few months back, Aaron wrote about the high-level aspects of Accessibility-First Programming, its importance, and specific strategies and tools for applying it within your software development process. It included insights and suggestions for Color and Contrast, Focus Management, the use of ARIA tags and attributes, and testing strategies and tools – all of which are important things to consider. 

In this post, we’re going to dig in a little deeper on three of those topics that I used on my last project: ARIA, the WCAG and what is needed for compliance, and some design principles of accessible design. We’ll include insights and further reading on relevant topics to help you better understand how to implement accessibility-first programming in your own development.

Go On The Fly

Go “On The Fly”

David Pitt Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Keyhole Creations, Programming, Tutorial Leave a Comment

People that know me, know that I love to fly fish and tie flies. I made up the saying “Time flies when you’re tying flies.” It is true, just like when you are trying to solve a programming problem, time flies.

Over the past few years, we at Keyhole have utilized Docker (with assorted technologies) and have gotten up to speed on the Hyperledger blockchain framework. Something that all of these technologies have in common is the Go language. Go is the language used to implement Docker, Hyperledger, OpenShift, and many other system-level applications.

Personally, I like to peek under the hood to better understand the tools I’m using. That led me to learning about the Go language. And in my opinion, the best way to learn a language is to build something.

So, I built an application for fly tying videos. There are numerous fly tying tutorials on YouTube, so I built an application that allows them to be organized into virtual fly boxes and types.

In this blog, I will introduce you to the Go language. We’ll go over some of the key language concepts by walking through how the https://flytyerworld.com server-side API is implemented using Go.