Even though the new Service Worker API allows you to cache away all of your website’s assets for an almost instant subsequent load, like when meeting someone new, the first impression is what counts. If the first load takes more than 3 seconds, more than 53% of all users will drop off. There are ways to mitigate this problem of a slow first load, but you can only get so far with this strategy, and you have to employ, or be, a front-end performance wizard. So, if an almost instant first load is fundamentally at odds with a native-like app experience, what can we do? In this article, Paul Bakaus will show you the way.
Read more…
In this article, David Catuhe will help you understand how shaders work and even experiment with their inner power in an easy way, thanks to Babylon.js. Before experimenting, David will show you how things work internally. When dealing with hardware-accelerated 3D, you will have to deal with two CPUs: the main CPU and the GPU. The GPU is a kind of extremely specialized CPU. Once all of the states are set, the CPU can define what to render: the geometry. The final step for the CPU is to define how to render the geometry. Shaders are pieces of code that the GPU will execute for each of the vertices and pixels it has to render.
Read more…
The key reason for Eric Rozell’s investigation of ChakraCore was to support the React Native framework on the Universal Windows Platform, which is a framework for declaring applications using JavaScript and the React programming model. Embedding ChakraCore in a C# application is quite easy and in this article, Eric Rozell will show you how.
Read more…
REST stands for “representational state transfer,” For the last few years, whenever somebody wants to start building an HTTP API, they pretty much exclusively use REST as the go-to architectural style, over alternative approaches such as XML-RPC, SOAP and JSON-RPC. In this article, Phil Sturgeon discusses two approaches in the context of building HTTP APIs. RPC and REST can both be used via other transportation protocols, such as AMQP, but that is another topic entirely.
Read more…
Traditionally, scaling was mostly relevant for server-side systems. As more and more users would use your application, you needed to make sure that you could add more servers to your cluster, that your database could be split across multiple servers, and so on. Due to rich web applications, scaling has become an important topic on the frontend. The frontend of a complex app needs to be able to handle a large number of users, developers and parts. In this article, Max Stoiber shares everything you need to now about React Boilerplate to get started.
Read more…
One of the upcoming features of JavaScript that I especially like is the support for asynchronous functions. In this article, I would like to show you a very practical example of building a server-side application using Koa 2, a new version of the web framework, which relies heavily on this feature.
First, I’ll recap what async functions are and how they work. Then, I’ll highlight the differences between Koa 1 and Koa 2. After that, I will describe my demo app for Koa 2, covering all aspects of development, including testing (using Mocha, Chai and Supertest) and deployment (using PM2).
Read more…
In the previous article, Clayton Anderson showed you how React Native can help you make iOS and Android apps with a shared code base, without sacrifices in quality. But what about the web? React Native for Web is intended to let you write a single app that runs in a browser using standard web technologies, or on iOS and Android as a real native mobile app. While I don’t think the project is ready for production use yet, its potential success could mark a massive change in how large multi-platform applications are built. Let’s jump in!
Read more…
ECMAScript 6 has brought hundreds of small and big improvements to JavaScript. More and more, developers are using ECMAScript 6 features, and soon these features will be unavoidable. In this tutorial, Faraz Kelhini will explore arguments and parameters in detail and see how ECMAScript 6 has upgraded them.
Read more…
Transitions between pages can enhance the experience by retaining the user’s context, maintaining their attention, and providing visual continuity and positive feedback, while also being aesthetically pleasing and fun and can reinforce branding when done well. In this article, Luigi De Rosa will create, step by step, a transition between pages. He will also talk about the pros and cons of this technique and how to push it to its limit.
Read more…
Redux is a predictable state container for JavaScript apps. It’s an application data-flow architecture, rather than a traditional library or a framework like Underscore.js and AngularJS. It is used mostly for application state management. To summarize it, Redux maintains the state of an entire application in a single immutable state tree (object), which can’t be changed directly. When something changes, a new object is created (using actions and reducers). Today, Alex Bachuk will go over the core concepts in detail.
Read more…
