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Building a Meme Generator With RedwoodJS — the JavaScript Answer to Rails

When I first heard about RedwoodJS, I thought it was just another front-end JavaScript framework. I wondered whether it would it be like React or more like Angular. As it turned out, I didn't know what RedwoodJS was, but now I can't wait to build more projects using it.

What Is RedwoodJS?

RedwoodJS is a full-stack, serverless JavaScript framework. It is the JavaScript answer to Rail's or Django. It uses the Jamstack approach to build an application with both front-end and back-end code. It also uses popular frameworks and libraries to accomplish this:

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How to Quickly Build a Progressive Web App Using Lightning Web Components

Earlier this year, a post came out on the Salesforce Developers Blog, entitled “How to Build Progressive Web Apps with Offline Support using Lightning Web Components.” During the post's discussion about using Lightning Web Components (LWC) to build progressive web apps, it mentioned push notifications. My interest was piqued. How simple would it be to use LWC to build an app for push notifications? It turns out  —  really simple.

A Quick Review:  What Is a Progressive Web App (PWA)?

While a PWA can be used in a web browser like any standard web application, the PWA's power comes from users being able to “install” the PWA to their desktop or mobile device, just like a native app. What you end up with is a kind of pseudo-native app  —  built and run with standard web-app technologies, but enhanced to do things like caching for offline access and push notifications.

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Create a Book Rating System With the Goodreads API and Slash GraphQL

GraphQL is a relatively new way to build user interfaces and APIs for consumers. It's essentially a querying language backed by a strongly typed schema, making it easy to write human-readable requests to get exactly the data you need. Compared to REST, whose responses are dictated by the server, GraphQL queries place the power squarely in the client's hands.

However, GraphQL is really just a spec that describes an API. Many features one might expect from an API, like authorization/authentication logic, bi-directional communication, or rate-limiting, still need to be implemented. Recently launched, Slash GraphQL is a fully managed GraphQL backend that takes care of all the hard work of setting up a GraphQL API, letting you concentrate on building your app.

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How to Build a Concurrent Chat App With Go and WebSockets

Go emerged from Google out of a need to build highly performant applications using an easy-to-understand syntax. It's a statically typed, compiled language developed by some of C's innovators, without the programming burden of manual memory management. Primarily, it was designed to take advantage of modern multicore CPUs and networked machines.

In this post, I'll demonstrate the capabilities of Go. We'll take advantage of Go's ability to create concurrent apps to build a chat app easily. On the backend, we'll use Redis as the intermediary to accept messages from the browser and send them to the subscribed clients. On the frontend, we'll use WebSockets via socket.io to facilitate client-side communication. We'll deploy it all on Heroku, a PaaS provider that makes it easy to deploy and host your apps. Just as Go makes programming such an application simple, Heroku makes it easy to supplement it with additional infrastructure.

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Exploring the Fundamentals of Node.js With Mario Casciaro and Luciano Mammino

Node.js’ high scalability and its ability to run Javascript code outside the territories of the web browsers gives it an edge over traditional platforms for web development. It is considered to be possibly the biggest innovation of the decade and is loved not just for its technical capabilities, but also for the paradigm shift that it introduced in web development and, in general, in the software development ecosystem. 

Let’s explore the journey of Mario Casciaro and Luciano Mammino, the authors of Node.js Design Patterns, Third Edition, and get some insights on how they mastered the platform. 

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Continuous Deployment Shouldn’t Be Hard

Introduction

Over the past decade, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) have become staples of the software development lifecycle. CI automates the process of merging code and checking for basic regressions and code quality issues, relieving some of the code review burdens on your dev team. CD and automated deployments eliminate the overhead involved each time a new feature or a hotfix needs to get deployed. 

Imagine if there were no more nights and weekends spent packaging builds and manually deploying across servers! A functional CI/CD setup makes it significantly easier to have a truly agile workflow, as you can deploy as frequently as you want to.

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A Full Stack Dev’s First Impressions of the Salesforce Platform, Part 2

Introduction

In Part 1, I completed an overview of Salesforce, the Salesforce platform, and its no/low-code options. Now, let’s get to the meaty part (at least for developers) – developing with code! After that, I’ll share some overall impressions of the platform.

What Does It Look Like to Develop With Code?

There are quite a lot of Salesforce-related packages and frameworks, but the first two trailheads introduce you primarily to the fundamentals: the Lightning Component framework, Apex, and Visualforce.

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Comparing Container Pipelines

Introduction

Containers brought a monumental shift to DevOps by allowing teams to ship code faster than ever before. However, we still have to go through the process of building, packaging, and deploying those containers. That's why we use container pipelines.

However, there are many different choices when it comes to container pipelines. How do we know which one to use? In this article, we'll compare six choices and cover the configuration, benefits, limitations, and pricing of each.