Web

Nearly all computer applications rely on one of two principal message standards: JSON and XML. Today, JSON is the most widely used format, having overtaken XML within the last 5 years, but is JSON better than XML?

In part 1 of this multi-part series on JSON vs. XML, Toptal Freelance Full-stack Developer Seva Safris will take a closer look at the history of the web to uncover the original purpose of XML and JSON, and analyze the software trends in recent years that lead to JSON becoming more popular than XML.

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.

The de facto standard for web application security is the Open Web Application Security Project’s Top 10 Project. It lists the ten most prevalent security threats based on an extensive amount of data and community feedback and was updated in late 2017.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Full-stack and System Security Developer Hrvoje Gazibara discusses the changes to the OWASP Top 10’s most recent revision by illustrating new vulnerabilities, and even some that were removed.

Is Angular vs. React just a matter of personal preference? This article gives an in-depth comparison and analysis of various Angular and React components in light of real-world applications.

In back-end software development, increased productivity often comes at the cost of performance. In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Eduardo Bautista shows us how the Phoenix framework builds on the familiar concepts from the Rails world, and makes it even easier to build robust concurrent applications without compromising performance.

PostCSS is the hot new tool that’s making the rounds on the front-end side of web development. It has been quickly and widely adopted, and possibly will have a significant impact on how we base our present-day CSS.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Nicolás J. Engler introduces us and guides us on how to start using this tool, expand it with plugins, or integrate with other CSS processors, task runners, or bundlers.

If you’ve spent your fair share of time developing web front-ends, you know that no amount of libraries and plugins are sufficient enough to make the development experience pleasant. Unpredictable event chains, complex data binding, and lack of structured data modeling only makes things worse.

Elm, a programming language built for front-end development, cuts to the root of all these problems and solves them there.

In this post, Toptal Software Engineer Stanislav Davydov provides a detailed guide to Elm and shows us how The Elm Architecture solves some of the most fundamental challenges of front-end development.

If you’re a veteran frontender, you’ve probably had some not-so-great experiences with designers, and chances are some designers have had an equally bad experience working with you. How can you make sure you get exactly what you need from your designer, without placing an undue burden on them?

It’s a tall order, but in this article Freelance Software Engineer Vedran Aberle Tokic outlines and addresses a number of potential issues that may become roadblocks for your execution. Implementing these suggestions may result in overhead for designers, but they can save enormous amounts of time and headache elsewhere.

Nowadays, almost all Python frameworks use WSGI as a means, if not the only means, to communicate with their web servers. This is how Django, Flask, and many other popular frameworks do it.

This article intends to provide readers with a glimpse into how WSGI works and allow them to build a simple WSGI application or server.