Task runners are the heroes (or villains, depending on your point of view) that quietly toil behind most web and mobile applications. Task runners provide value through the automation of numerous development tasks such as concatenating files, spinning up development servers and compiling code.
In this article, we’ll cover Grunt, Gulp, Webpack and npm scripts. We’ll also provide some... Read More
Web applications are everywhere. There is no official definition, but we’ve made the distinction: web applications are highly interactive, dynamic and performant, while websites are informational and less transient. This very rough categorization provides us with a starting point, from which to apply development and design patterns.
These patterns are often established through a different... Read More
Node.js brought about a great revolution for JavaScript developers by allowing us to write code that runs directly on our machines; our skills were no longer limited to browsers alone. At first, many of us simply saw this as a way to write our application servers without needing to learn another language, but we all quickly caught on to the fact that we could also write tools for the command... Read More
Things often come full circle in software engineering. The web in particular started with servers delivering content down to the client. Recently, with the creation of modern web frameworks such as AngularJS and Ember, we’ve seen a push to render on the client and only use a server for an API. We’re now seeing a possible return or, rather, more of a combination of both architectures happening.... Read More
Web scraping is the process of programmatically retrieving information from the Internet. As the volume of data on the web has increased, this practice has become increasingly widespread, and a number of powerful services have emerged to simplify it.
Unfortunately, the majority of them are costly, limited or have other disadvantages. Instead of turning to one of these third-party... Read More
Node.js is a rapidly growing technology that has been overtaking the world of server-side programming with surprising speed. MongoDB is a technology that’s revolutionizing database usage. Together, the two tools are a potent combination, thanks to the fact that they both employ JavaScript and JSON.
At first glance, coming to grips with Node.js and MongoDB can seem both time-consuming... Read More
In this article, we’ll go over the concepts and techniques required to build a command line tool using Node.js and PhantomJS. Building a command line tool enables you to automate a process that would otherwise take a lot longer.
Command line tools are built in a myriad of languages, but the one we’ll focus on is Node.js. For those short on time, I’ve condensed the core process into... Read More
Created by Ryan Dahl in 2009, Node.js is a relatively new technology which has gained a lot of popularity among Web developers recently. However, not everyone knows what it really is. Node.js is essentially a server-side JavaScript environment that uses an asynchronous event-driven model. What this means is simple: it’s an environment which is intended for writing scalable, high performance... Read More
