Toptal Engineering Blog

The WebSocket protocol is one of the ways to make your application handle real-time messages. The most common alternatives are long polling and server-sent events. In this article, Toptal Freelance Java Developer Tomasz Dąbrowski shows us how to implement WebSockets with the Spring Boot framework, and use STOMP for effective client-server communication.

Updating live applications used to be a tedious and somewhat risky affair, but with the emergence of modern development frameworks and tools, updates and deployment are becoming straightforward. In this article, Toptal Java Developer Elene Latsoshvili explains how you can update a Laravel app with zero downtime, and how this can be done for most PHP applications.

Providing production support to an application is one of the most challenging aspects of software development. In this article, Toptal Freelance Java Developer Flavio Pezzini shows us techniques that can prevent bugs and make finding issues in production much faster.

Google’s Flutter mobile SDK only recently made it to version 1.0, but it is already catching up with React Native in terms of market share. Flutter is also used to develop apps for Google’s upcoming Fuchsia OS. In this article, Toptal Java Developer Nemanja Stosic demonstrates how to create a simple messaging app using Flutter and Firebase.

While components have been available in Angular since the beginning, they’re still easy to mess up with common mistakes like people not using them at all, creating components instead of attribute directives, and more. In this article, Toptal Freelance JavaScript Developer Valters Valdersteins differentiates the correct and incorrect ways to use Angular components and illustrates them with examples.

Automatically scaling container deployments in a microservices-based app architecture is downright luxurious...once it's set up. But what's the best way to tune an app's orchestration parameters?

WordPress development relies on tried and tested technologies and techniques. This allows for good backward compatibility but also causes many developers to stick to legacy solutions for far too long. In this article, Toptal WordPress Developer Stefano Ginella introduces us to the Roots stack and explains how it can help WordPress developers harness the latest front-end technologies.

The Bitcoin Lightning Network is an independent solution that’s heralded as the solution to bitcoin’s scaling problem by keeping fees minuscule and making transactions instant, away from the blockchain. In this article, Toptal Freelance Blockchain Developer Amin Shah Gilani explores what the Bitcoin Lightning Network really is, how it can make the guarantees it provides, and its current state.