Redux is one of the hottest libraries in front-end development these days. However, many people are confused about what it is and what its benefits are. As the documentation states, Redux is a predictable state container for JavaScript apps. To rephrase that, it's an application data-flow architecture, rather than a traditional library or a framework like Underscore.js and AngularJS.
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Change is difficult in large corporations. But sometimes it is possible. In fact, we published Inside Microsoft’s New Rendering Engine For The “Project Spartan” when the new browser was just announced. A year has passed since then. We kindly thank Microsoft for keeping Smashing Magazine alive and supporting the community with technical articles on practical JavaScript techniques, open source... Read More
Have you heard of Docker but thought that it’s only for system administrators and other Linux geeks? Or have you looked into it and felt a bit intimidated by the jargon? Or are you silently suffering with a messy development environment that seems to break all of the time in various mysterious ways? Then read on. By the end of this article, you should have a basic understanding of Docker and... Read More
Have you ever wanted to use a particular CSS feature but didn’t because it wasn’t fully supported in all browsers? Or, worse, it was supported in all browsers, but the support was buggy, inconsistent or even completely incompatible? If this has happened to you — and I’m betting it has — then you should care about Houdini.
Houdini is a new W3C task force whose ultimate goal is to make this... Read More
If you’ve ever worked in an agile environment, chances are you’ve had your share of “retrospectives” — meetings where people write what made them “glad,” “mad” or “sad” onto different-colored notes, post them onto a board, arrange them in groups and — most importantly — talk about them.
These meetings are straightforward, as long as everyone is in the same room. But if you’re working with... Read More
Mark Zuckerberg once said, “The biggest mistake that we made, as a company, is betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native… because it just wasn’t there. And it’s not that HTML5 is bad. I’m actually, long term, really excited about it.” And who wouldn’t be excited by the prospect of a single code base that works across multiple platforms?
Unfortunately, Facebook felt that HTML5 didn’t... Read More
There’s no shortage of boosterism or excitement about the fledgling service worker API, now shipping in some popular browsers. There are cookbooks and blog posts, code snippets and tools. But I find that when I want to learn a new web concept thoroughly, rolling up my proverbial sleeves, diving in and building something from scratch is often ideal.
The bumps and bruises, gotchas and bugs... Read More
Responsive websites, even the most modern ones, often struggle with selecting image resolutions that best match the various user devices. They compromise on either the image dimensions or the number of images. We can solve these issues and start calculating image breakpoints more mathematically, rather than haphazardly.
The lives of web developers aren’t getting any simpler as the number... Read More
The development of CSS, like all languages, is an iterative process. With every major release, we get new features and syntaxes that help us write our styles. CSS Level 3 introduced features that enable us to design interactions that previously were possible only with JavaScript. With every new day, tools emerge to make styling easier and more flexible.
One of the relatively recent tools... Read More