JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

In this tutorial we are going to build a character voting app (inspired by Facemash) for EVE Online - a massively multiplayer online game. You will learn how to build a REST API with Node.js, save and retrieve data from MongoDB, track online visitors in real-time using Socket.IO, build a single-page app experience using React + Flux with server-side rendering and then finally deploy it to the cloud.

With the proliferation of more and more of the web being driven by JavaScript, The speed of the browser DOM is becoming increasingly noticeable.

Lots of sites being driven by popular JavaScript frameworks like Ember, Backbone, or Angular can take a while to render into the DOM. This forces the user to wait for the app to bootstrap itself before they can start viewing & ‘using’ the app.

In this post I’ll discuss how I built CoffeeRun as a Single-Page Application (SPA) using Node.js and Knockout.js. This was my first foray into the world of SPAs and Node, so it’s written as a guide to anyone else who is looking to dip their toes in for the first time. I’ll also cover deployment to Azure.

So, I went back and asked why Firebase and why are you fitting Firebase in your application architecture? Here are 2 major answers

• Real time data sync
• Offline storage

After giving the above reasons a good thought, I have come up with the below architecture that will “emulate” Firebase using Websockets and Local Storage inside a Node.js/MongoD.

If this solution gets stable over a period of time, I may create a yeoman/slush generator to scaffold a Node.js/Express.js and a MongoDB app with real time data sync and offline storage capabilities.

For this post, I will use a simple Todo app as an example. 

Authentication is one of the big parts of every application. Security is always something that is changing and evolving.

We’ll build a quick API using Node and Express and we’ll be using POSTman to test it.

The main workflow of this is that we will:

1. Have unprotected and protected routes
2. A user will authenticate by passing in a name and a password and get back a token
3. The user will store this token on their client-side and send it for every request
4. We will validate this token, and if all is good, pass back information in JSON format

Node devs tend to be minimalists, DIY’ers, Lego™ artists, if you will. We want a nice set of tools and pieces at our disposal that we can compose into whatever creation we imagine.

If you’ve bought into Node’s small module paradigm, stuff like Ember, Angular, and even jQuery can feel a bit like excessively large Duplo™ blocks.

To be clear, this doesn’t make them bad. I’m glad they exist. Clearly, they empower scores of developers to create some great things on the frontend.

Of course we think Ampersand modules are a great match for building frontends for our Node applications. But for Ampersand we use the term “framework” very loosely. As demonstrated by how people are using it, it’s really is just a loosely coupled set of tools.

In the end, the only constant in our field is change. We simply cannot, in good conscience, assert that any single toolset (even our own) is the only valid approach. It’s just not how we think development should work.

In our fast-changing world, technology is rapidly taking giant leaps forward. For the people who are just beginning to take part in this new “gold rush” of web development, it is sometimes inevitable to feel a sense of desperation of not being able to keep up with the evolution. In this article, I will attempt to give a brief overview of one of the most-adored features of Facebook’s Reactframework—isomorphism(a.k.a. server side rendering).

Webpack is really a great JavaScript bundler, allowing to turn messy and numerous JavaScript into a single minified and optimized script. Yet, we missed a good getting started tutorial. Here is one...

I know, I know it is too early to be building end to end apps with Angular 2.0.

A MEAN stack app would typically consist of a server layer built with Nodejs & Express – Express being the web framework. MongoDB for data persistence & Angular as the client side MVW framework.

First, we are going to setup an express app, build the REST API to Create, Read, Update & Delete todos and then integrate it with the Angular app.

The goal of this tutorial is to guide you through the creation of a Reddit/Hacker News clone using the MEAN stack. By completing this tutorial, you will gain a basic understanding of the MEAN stack including building a REST interface with Express.js on top of Node.js and using that interface to perform CRUD operations on a database via an AngularJS frontend.

Isomorphic means that it's designed to run a lot of the same code on both the client and the server. Typically that includes a lot of rendering and domain logic. (Not to be confused with isomorphisms from category theory / functional programming. That's a totally different thing.)

There are many advantages to building apps this way, but the primary advantages are:

• Cross-functional teams. Since everything is written in JavaScript, it's easier to build teams who know how to work on both the client and server sides of the app.
• Write once, run everywhere. With the exception of a few library substitutions and browser polyfills, the code is shared, which means you have to write about half the code you'd write working on a non-isomorphic app.
• More productive developers. Since the app is more consistent across the stack, there's no context switching when you need to maintain application behavior on both sides of the stack. Write the behavior once, and you're done. Context switching slows developers down significantly.

A simple tutorial for working with Ember Data, Node, Express and MongoDB to build an api.

I have really been enjoying working with EmberJS lately, once you get over the learning curve and understand how things should relate, it becomes really fast and fun!

Lets take a look at how we can use Ember Data with Node (or io.js),Express and MongoDB. For this example lets use the Ember CLI to start an Ember application fast!