JavaScript module bundling has been around for a while. RequireJS had its first commits in 2009, then Browserify made its debut, and since then several other bundlers have spawned across the Internet. Among that group, webpack has jumped out as one of the best. If you’re not familiar with it, in this article, Joseph Zimmerman will help you get started with this powerful tool.
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Wondering how to get started with the Web Speech API? If you’re unfamiliar, this API gives you (the developer) the ability to voice-enable your website in two directions: listening to your users via the SpeechRecognition interface and talking back to them via the SpeechSynthesis interface. In this article, Aaron Gustafson guides you through this experimental API and covers everything you need to know to help you get a better understanding of how it works.
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In this article, Lea Verou explains what an HTML API is, why they’re useful, and which important lesson developers can learn from them. Keep reading to find out how to design a good one. You might be wondering, “All HTML and CSS authors know JavaScript, right?” Wrong. Take a look at the results of following poll.
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The rise of JavaScript frameworks such as React, Ember and recently Angular 2, the effort of the W3C to standardize a web-native component system, pattern libraries and style guides being considered the “right way” to build web applications, and many other things have illuminated this revolution.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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