Tag: Web

Frontend Routing with Sammy.js

Traditionally web applications were built using backend technology. A request is made to a server and based on the URL being requested the server responds by generating a resource, usually HTML.

To do this servers need to “route” requests to different resource generation logic. This logic is what backend developers build.

This worked well for many years, but as browsers became more advanced code started being moved from the backend to the frontend.

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Personal Cloud Drive with ownCloud

If you’ve ever used Dropbox or Google Drive you know what cloud based storage is. It’s a hard drive located somewhere on the internet for you to store and share your files.

But what if you have terabytes of files, or a preexisting server infrastructure at your work or house? Are those solutions really the best? Is there a better self hosted solution?

There is and it’s called ownCloud.

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Making Desktop JavaScript Apps with node-webkit

Update: node-webkit is now called NW.js and uses io.js and Blink instead of Node.js and WebKit. All other information is still correct.

JavaScript can be run in a browser normally, on a server with Node.js, and on mobile devices with Cordova, but where else can we use JavaScript to program?

Well, plenty other places, but the last big place to write programs is the desktop and today I’m covering writing desktop JavaScript applications with node-webkit.

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Making Mobile JavaScript Apps with Cordova

Last time I covered what Node.js is and briefly covered creating server side JavaScript applications with it. But as part of my recent desire to write everything in JavaScript I have also started writing mobile applications in JavaScript using Cordova.

I’ve written mobile applications in various technolgies and even have some on the Google Play Store, but I like writing mobile applications in Cordova more than other technology I’ve used, which are Java and Flex with Adobe AIR.

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Releasing Frontend Libraries Via Bower

For a long time I’ve had a CSS and JavaScript library that I’ve maintained for my personal and professional projects. The CSS included UI components, like buttons and switches, and the JavaScript were ports of all the PHP functions I had written so I have the same functions client side that I had server side.

Recently I released these libraries under the banner of a larger project, MogulMVC.

Since releasing them on GitHub I’ve been able to install them in any project by just running a git clone or git pull in my CSS or JS directory, and this makes it very easy to keep them updated, but it was still lacking something.

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