This tutorial aims to help you understand how v-model works on native inputs and on custom components by default. Also, you’ll learn how to create custom checkboxes and radios that emulate how v-model works on them natively.
Read more…
When we set out to build MeetSpace (a video conferencing app for distributed teams), we had a familiar decision to make: What’s our tech stack going to be? We gathered our requirements, reviewed our team’s skillset and ultimately decided to use vanilla JavaScript and to avoid a front-end framework.
Using this approach, we were able to create an incredibly fast and light web application that is also less work to maintain over time. The average page load on MeetSpace has just 1 uncached request and is 2 KB to download, and the page is ready within 200 milliseconds. Let’s take a look at what went into this decision and how we achieved these results.
Read more…
In 2017, the question is not whether we should use a responsive design framework. Increasingly, we are using them. The question is which framework should we be using, and why, and whether we should use the whole framework or just parts of it.
With dozens of responsive design frameworks available to download, many web developers appear to be unaware of any except for Bootstrap. Like most of web development, responsive design frameworks are not one-size-fits-all. Let’s compare the latest versions of Bootstrap, Foundation and UIkit for their similarities and differences.
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…
When designing a graphical user interface, there is always an open question: How do we automate testing for it? And how do we make sure the website layout stays responsive and displays correctly on all kinds of devices with various resolutions? Add to this the complications arising from dynamic content, requirements for internationalization and localization, and it becomes a real challenge.
In this article, I will guide you through an interesting new layout testing technique. Using Galen Framework, I will provide a detailed tutorial for writing meaningful generalized layout tests, which can be executed in any browser and on any device and at the same time used as a single source of truth in your design documentation.
Read more…
Whether you’ve just discovered BEM or are an old hand (in web terms anyway!), you probably appreciate what a useful methodology it is. If you don’t know what BEM is, I suggest you read about it on the BEM website before continuing with this post, because I’ll be using terms that assume a basic understanding of this CSS methodology.
Read more…
When you start a fresh web project or start digging into an existing code base, chances are you’re trying to create or enhance a feature for your users. The last thing you want to do is spend time customizing build tools and creating infrastructure to develop your application. If you land a new client, you want to show them features today, not in a week after you’ve cobbled together a build pipeline.
As you might already know, Ember is an “opinionated” JavaScript web framework focused on building ambitious, rich client web applications. Technologically, Ember has positioned itself as theantidote to hype fatigue. It’s a framework that just won’t die, but keeps pressing on with each innovation and with a commitment to backwards-compatibility.
Read more…
I had been doing server-side programming with Symfony 2 and PHP for at least three years before I started to see some productivity problems with it. Don’t get me wrong, I like Symfony quite a lot: It’s a mature, elegant and professional framework. But I’ve realized that too much of my precious time is spent not on the business logic of the application itself, but on supporting the architecture of the framework.
I don’t think I’ll surprise anyone by saying that we live in a fast-paced world. The whole startup movement is a constant reminder to us that, in order to achieve success, we need to be able to test our ideas as quickly as possible. The faster we can iterate on our ideas, the faster we can reach customers with our solutions, and the better our chances of getting a product-market fit before our competitors do or before we exceed our limited budget. And in order to do so, we need instruments suitable to this type of work.
Read more…
In the first part of the case study about Mail.Ru Group product design unification, I described our first approach — a mobile web framework. Aside from creating a unified visual style and interaction principles for a dozen services, we’ve also transformed our design process from the classic “prototype → design mock-up → HTML → implementation” approach for every screen, to a modern and more efficient framework-based approach.
In this second part I’ll show how we have improved the same technology to embody larger versions of these products and made our “Bootstrap on steroids” more powerful. In the spring of 2012, our business unit acquired 11 content-based projects: Auto, Events Guide, Health, Horoscopes, Kids, Lady, Moto, News, Sports, TV, and Weather. Many of them are very successful in their market niche in Russia; however, they each have their own history, often with outsourced designs that led to inconsistencies.
Read more…
It has been an exciting year for my team. Last year we kicked off a project using React, and over the course of the project we’ve learned a lot about React and Flux — Facebook’s recommended architectural principles for React apps. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the key lessons we’ve learned.
Whether you’re new to React and Flux, or going as far as building your own Flux implementation, I think you’ll not only enjoy this journey with us, but find some thought-provoking questions and wisdom you can apply in your own endeavors.
Read more…
