Getting Started with React and JSX

Chris Shatrov Development Technologies, JavaScript, React Leave a Comment

I have been with Keyhole Software for nearly four years. Every time I write a new blog post it is about a new framework that I had to pick up and learn that year.

I write a lot of JavaScript daily, but previously never had the chance to start coding a project with React. But this year, I worked on a project with React. So as expected, I wanted to share my thoughts and my experiences with React.

In this post, I will give a quick introduction to React and talk about its main, most important, components. We will also take a peek at JSX and explain it, and show some code examples, which will help you have a better understanding of this library before you can move on to more complex things…

The Wonderful Wide World of webpack: Unpacking Awesomeness

Aaron Diffenderfer Development Technologies, JavaScript Leave a Comment

In the past couple of years, webpack has come a long way. It continues to rapidly evolve and revolutionize the way we bundle JavaScript and more. For some of us that have been doing development for more than a few years, seeing an amazing tool like webpack and all of its abilities is mind-blowing. If only it had come into existence a bit sooner…

If you’re like me, you may have stumbled across webpack, hearing about its gazillion configuration options, along with a bunch of plugins, numerous ways to optimize your bundle, and more. So much that it all makes your head spin and you begin to feel overwhelmed as you attempt to make sense of it. That’s honestly how my journey began with Webpack.

My first exposure to it…Ejecting the webpack.config.js file from an AngularCLI project just to see what the all the hype was about and to see what I had been missing out on the past few years. After getting past the initial shock of the number of lines of code and the seemingly large structure (how I felt after my first few glances, having to shield my eyes and take a few deep breaths), I started to see many of the benefits. This continued as I read through the webpack documentation, various blogs, and StackOverflow (every developer’s most-accessed site) and as I began trying out a variety of configurations for some actual projects.

As I discovered, webpack can be used with zero config or configured literally in 8,675,309 ways, plus or minus a handful. And there about just as many blogs that cover all of the variations and flavors.

In this post, however, the goal is to highlight some tips & tricks along with features I’ve found to be particularly useful and reasons why you should be using webpack – if you haven’t already started…

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BackboneJS with Webpack: A lesson in optimization

Brandon Klimek BackboneJS, Development Technologies, JavaScript, Microservices 2 Comments

Attention: The following article was published over 9 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. Please keep that in mind as you read the post.Developing a large BackboneJS application presents a unique design problem. As developers, we like to organize our code so it is understandable, logical, and predictable. However, doing so can cause performance issues on …

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Pack It Up, Pack It In

Steven MountJoy Development Technologies, JavaScript 3 Comments

Attention: The following article was published over 10 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. Please keep that in mind as you read the post.Let me begin with a list of usual suspects up to no good in the browser: CoffeeScript (or TypeScript) Less (or Sass/Scss) Jade (or Handlebars, Mustache) I mean, because, you know, writing …