Web

In this tutorial, Toptal Engineer Orban Botond demonstrates how to use the Grape gem – a REST-like API micro-framework for Ruby – to build backend support in Rails for a JSON API. Grape is designed to run as a mountable rack engine that complements your web applications without interfering with them.

CSS preprocessors have been around for quite a while now. These tools, among many things, promise convenience in writing style sheets for the web. However, not everyone is taking advantage of these utilities, and is still resorting to writing vanilla CSS. In this article, Toptal engineer Marcelo Mazza discusses some of the reasons why he thinks Sass is the way to go and why you should be using it in your projects.

Mastering CSS is an absolute necessity for any solid web designer or developer. This tutorial walks you through the fundamentals of CSS layout principles, from classic CSS2 techniques to the latest approaches in CSS3. Learn more about how to leverage all that CSS has to offer in order to optimize both the user’s experience and the quality of your code.

Ractive.js provides powerful capabilities for web app development in a way that is refreshingly simple to learn and use. In this article, Toptal Engineer Eugene Mirotin walks you through the process of building a simple Ractive search app, demonstrating some of Ractive’s key features and the ways in which it helps simplify web app development. Code samples are provided and explained.

Although the most wide-spread and supported way of running Django is on a Linux system (e.g., with uwsgi and nginx), it actually doesn’t take much work to get it to run on IIS. In this article, Toptal Engineer Ivan Voras walks you through a step-by-step tutorial, clearly explaining how to install Django on IIS.

Modern web browsers provide a rich set of APIs; some of which have been around for a long time, and have since been used to build powerful web applications.

Web Audio API has been popular among HTML5 game developers, however, the Web MIDI API and its capabilities have yet to be utilized. In this article, Toptal engineer Stéphane P. Péricat guides you through the basics of the Web MIDI API, and shows you how to build a simple monosynth to play with your favorite MIDI device.

Today we have thousands of digital and printed resources that provide step-by-step instructions about developing all kinds of different web applications. Development environments are “smart” enough to catch and fix many mistakes that early developers battled with regularly. There are even many different development platforms that easily turn simple static HTML pages into highly interactive applications.

All of these development patterns, practices, and platforms share common ground, and they are all prone to similar mistakes caused by the very nature of web applications.

Web services and their APIs abound. Unfortunately, the vast majority are difficult to use. Reasons range from poor design, to lack of documentation, to volatility, to unresolved bugs, or in some cases, all of the above.

Follow the guidance in this post to help ensure that your web API is clean, well-documented, and easy-to-use. Such APIs are truly rare and are therefore much more likely to be widely adopted and used.