Web Front-end

Mobile web development—optimizing web apps for mobile devices—is necessary for modern apps. Discover the best methods and tools for the development of highly functional, intuitive, and easy-to-use mobile web apps.

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.

I've been an Engineer at Toptal for just about one year now, working on the same project since I joined the network: Ondello, a service that connects doctors and patients over WebRTC. When I first joined Ondello, I was hired as a Senior Ruby on Rails Developer, tasked to build a service up from scratch. These days, we're a team of multiple developers working on a fairly large, complex system. With this post, I'd like to share the story behind Ondello. Specifically, I'd like to talk about: how a simple application became not-so-simple, and how our use of cutting-edge technologies posed problems I'd never considered before.

If you haven’t tried AngularJS yet, you’re missing out. The framework consists of a tightly integrated toolset that will help you build well structured, rich client-side applications in a modular fashion—with less code and more flexibility. One of the reasons I love working with AngularJS is because of its flexibility regarding server communication. Like most JavaScript MVC frameworks, it lets you work with any server-side technology as long as it can serve your app through a RESTful web API. But Angular also provides services on top of XHR that dramatically simplify your code and allow you to abstract API calls into reusable services. As a result, you can move your model and business logic to the front-end and build back-end agnostic web apps. In this AngularJS tutorial, we'll do just that, one step at a time.

Nowadays, your website will be visited by a wide variety of devices: desktops with large monitors, mid-sized laptops, tablets, smartphones, and more. To achieve an optimal user experience, your site should be adjusting its layout in response to these varied devices (i.e., to their varied screen resolutions and dimensions). The process of responding to the form of the user's device is referred to as (you guessed it) responsive web design (RWD).

Node.js shines in real-time web apps that employ push technology over WebSocket. Node's real-time, two-way connections---where the client and server can each initiate communication---enable the freer exchange of data.

After much thought, I decided to engineer a solution to the idea abandonment problem. I call it the ‘Init' project (or Init.js). The core of the idea is to have a single project to start them all, to let the developer or the technical founder make all of the essential decisions at once, and receive an appropriate starting template based on those decisions.

Demand within the web design scene today has changed over the past few years: designers with front-end skills, and front-end developers with design skills, are more and more in demand. Yes, you could argue that the jobs are completely different—and maybe you straight-up don't like one of them—but truth be told, in my six years as a freelance web developer and twelve years as a designer, I’ve learned that it's much harder to get by as just a web designer or just a front-end developer. Wearing both hats has a lot of advantages: from a professional perspective alone, you can find work more easily and charge a higher rate because you’re bringing more to the table.