Creating A Blockchain In JavaScript

Vince Pendergrass Articles, Blockchain, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript Leave a Comment

Blockchain is all the buzz now. And for good reason! A distributed public ledger that is extremely secure through encryption?! Imagine the millions of applicable use cases. A blockchain can be created and maintained using any modern language.

For the purpose of this blog, let’s dive into a blockchain written in JavaScript. Hopefully, this doesn’t just serve as a simple code example but also gives a very basic understanding of how a blockchain actually works.

Do keep in mind this will be very simplist…

React Native With Expo

Lou Mauget Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Mobile, React, React Native 1 Comment

The React Native framework supports an installable mobile application created from JavaScript source code. It is not a React-based web app wrapper. It isn’t a code generator. There is no required application source code in Java, Objective-C, Swift, or Kotlin. Moreover, a single React Native application targets both iOS and Android devices.

In this blog, we show a quick-start that results in an executing application on a phone, within five minutes. That application is live-reloadable, native cross-platform, and written in JavaScript. It is not a web application.

Java-Based UI Frameworks

Rik Scarborough Articles, Java, Programming 1 Comment

In today’s development environment, there is an abundance of frameworks that we can choose from for front-end or user interface (UI) work.

I was recently talking with a friend about UI development. He has also been a programmer since programming was considered an arcane art (when those of us that did it were considered like Gandalf the Grey facing the Balrog). Or maybe we just saw ourselves that way. Regardless, both of us have been Java programmers for a great deal of that time.

We both lamented the fact that it was a context switch to go from coding most of our projects in Java, then needing to switch to JavaScript for the front end.

Based on conversations I’ve seen online, several readers are warming up their keyboards to chide me for complaining about having to code in JavaScript. Keep your keys cool, both of us and our co-workers are experienced in, and happy to write in, JavaScript and any of its frameworks for our clients. But using JavaScript isn’t always the best approach.

 In this post, we introduce two frameworks that allow you to code your user interface in Java: GWT & Vaadin…

Gaining Docker Image Size Efficiencies By Separating Application Layers

Luke Patterson Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Docker, Java, Spring Boot Leave a Comment

Problem

I was pushing a new Docker image tag for each application code commit, and the admins of the private registry were getting annoyed at how much space I was using.

Solution Summary

Yes, I know there are strategies to clean up old tags but I first wanted to reduce the impact of the tags I was pushing. With the right layering strategy, I knew I could reduce the net registry size increase of consecutive tag pushes.

I wanted to only push what had actually changed in the application. In addition to reducing the impact on the registry, having smaller tag deltas could possibly speed up rolling deployments since nodes could potentially have less to download.

Building a Node.js Service with AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and Serverless Framework

Matthew Brown Articles, AWS, Cloud, JavaScript, Node.js, Tutorial 3 Comments

My favorite new technology as a developer is serverless computing. The convenience and cost make it a very compelling choice for running options in the cloud. Especially for proof of concepts or quick ways to prove out ideas. Using serverless computing to get up and running takes very little effort and the costs of running an application in the cloud are minimal. Serverless really empowers developers to act on ideas as quickly as possible.

In this post, I’m going to briefly touch on what serverless computing is and the pros and cons of using it. Then I will build a Node.js service to do CRUD operations using AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and the Serverless Framework. You can view the finished product on Github.