Over the last five years, Node.js has helped to bring uniformity to software development. You can do anything in Node.js, whether it be front-end development, server-side scripting, cross-platform desktop applications, cross-platform mobile applications, Internet of Things, you name it. Writing command line tools has also become easier than ever before because of Node.js — not just any command line tools, but tools that are interactive, useful and less time-consuming to develop.
If you are a front-end developer, then you must have heard of or worked on Gulp, Angular CLI, Cordova, Yeoman and others. Have you ever wondered how they work?
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In the past few months, chat bots have become very popular, thanks to Slack, Telegram and Facebook Messenger. But the chat bot idea is not new at all.
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Chances are pretty good that you’ve worked with, or at least understand the concept of, server compression. By compressing website assets on the server prior to transferring them to the browser, we’ve been able to achieve substantial performance gains.
For quite some time, the venerable gzip algorithm has been the go-to solution for reducing the size of page assets. A new kid on the block has been gaining support in modern browsers, and its name is Brotli. In this article, you’ll get hands-on with Brotli by writing a Node.js-powered HTTP server that implements this new algorithm, and we’ll compare its performance to gzip.
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Recently, I’ve been working on an isomorphic React website. This website was developed using React, running on an Express server. Everything was going well, but I still wasn’t satisfied with a load-blocking CSS bundle. So, I started to think about options for how to implement the critical-path technique on an Express server.
This article contains my notes about installing and configuring a critical-path performance optimization using Express and Handlebars. Throughout this article, I’ll be using Node.js and Express. Familiarity with them will help you understand the examples.
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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 examples of each one to get you started. Near the end, I’ll throw out some easy wins and tips for integrating ideas from this post into your application.
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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 a locally distributed team, things can get a bit tricky. Let’s address this by creating a virtual version of our board to allow team members in different locations to hold their retrospective just as if they were in the same room.
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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.
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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 line that automate a lot of things in our development cycles.
npm, which is bundled with Node.js, made this even easier by giving us quick and easy access to tools that others have created, which we install on our machines to access from wherever we are in our system. JavaScript was finally a “real” programming language. But with these new capabilities came a lot of best practices that needed to be discovered, because there were many new scenarios that wouldn’t be found in the browser. In particular, I’d like to discuss a practice that has been on my mind a lot lately that I think much of the community needs to evaluate.
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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.
React has quickly risen to immense popularity in the JavaScript community. There are a number of reasons for its success. One is that Facebook created it and uses it. This means that many developers at Facebook work with it, fixing bugs, suggesting features and so on.
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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 resources, you can use Node.js to create a powerful web scraper that is both extremely versatile and completely free.
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