JavaScript

As mobile and tablet devices come closer to achieving final world domination, web technology is in a race to accommodate the ever-growing number screen sizes. However, devising tools to meet the challenges of this phenomenon brings a whole new set of problems, with one of the latest buzzwords to emerge being “responsive web”.

Promises are a hot topic in JavaScript, and you should definitely get acquainted with them. They are not easy to wrap your head around, it can take a few articles, and a decent amount of practice to comprehend them. Aim of this article is to help you understand Promises, and nudge you to get more practice using them.

React.js is a fantastic library. It is only one part of a front-end application stack, however. It doesn’t have much to offer when it comes to managing data and state. Facebook, the makers of React, have offered some guidance there in the form of Flux. I’ll introduce basic Flux control flow, discuss what’s missing for Stores, and how to use Backbone Models and Collections to fill the gap in a “Flux-compliant” way.

Ember Data is a library for robustly managing model data in Ember.js applications. Ember Data provides a more flexible and streamlined development workflow, minimizing code churn in response to what would otherwise be high impact changes. This thorough guide introduces Ember Data’s key constructs and paradigms, demonstrating the value it can provide to you as a developer.

In this follow-up to his first highly popular AngularJS tutorial, Toptal engineer Raoni Boaventura guides you through the steps of setting up your project, including scaffolding, dependency management, and preparing it for testing.

A year after Google’s launch of Polymer, Toptal engineer Alejandro Hernandez takes it out for a test drive to see if it’s yet ready for prime time. This post explores the maturity and stability of Polymer.js as a foundation for large-scale application development. The results and conclusions from this analysis are provided, along with an introductory overview of the technology.

JavaScript is much more nuanced than most developers initially realize. Even for those with more experience, some of JavaScript’s most salient features continue to be misunderstood and lead to confusion. One such feature, described in this article, is the way that property and variable lookups are performed and the resulting performance ramifications to be aware of.

Beyond its beauty, in recent years Córdoba has been enjoying a rapidly growing reputation as a technology center, one that may soon rival Buenos Aires as Argentina’s main technology hub. Last month, Toptal coordinated and hosted a highly successful and well-attended JavaScript Technical Conference in Córdoba, Argentina. Read about how the event came together and the vibrant network of software developers in and around Córdoba.

As modern web applications do more and more on the client-side (the fact itself that we now refer to them as “web applications” as opposed to “web sites” is quite telling), there has been rising interest in client-side frameworks. There are a lot of players in this field but for applications with lots of functionality and many moving parts, two of them stand out in particular: Angular.js and Ember.js.

Angular.js has already been introduced on this blog, so we’re going to focus on Ember.js in this post, in which we’ll build a simple Ember application to catalog your music collection. You’ll be introduced to the framework’s main building blocks and get a glimpse into its design principles.