Toptal Engineering Blog

The GWT Web Toolkit, formerly known as Google Web Toolkit, is a set of development tools for building and optimizing complex browser-based applications using the Java programming language. What makes GWT not “yet another Java tool to write web apps,” is the fact that the heart of the toolkit is a compiler that converts Java into JavaScript, enabling developers to write front-end web applications while leveraging all of Java’s strengths.

Many developers often overlook, or do not thoroughly think through the implications of open source licenses. Whether you’re planning to open source your own project under one of these licenses, or you intend to integrate some other open source project into one of your own, it’s important to have at least some knowledge of what these licenses are, how they may affect your projects, and how they complement or contradict one another. In this article, Toptal engineer David Marín gives us a comprehensive guide to some of the most popular open source licenses, and several rules of thumb to follow when choosing a license for future open source projects.

When Mike Bostock created D3.js, he introduced a tried and true reusable charts pattern for implementing the same chart in any number of selections. However, the limitations of this pattern are realized once the chart is initialized. In this article, Toptal engineer Rob Moore presents a revised reusable charts pattern that leverages the full power of D3.js.

Today, we will be taking a look at the future of mobile payments and emerging opportunities for developers. Needless to say, with each new opportunity, developers will have to face new challenges.

However, since we are talking about money, I don’t think anyone expects a shortage of software developers eager to learn a few new tricks and get into this space.

Inheriting someone else’s code can be a nightmare, especially when the code is poorly designed and lacks documentation. In this post, Toptal Engineer Juan Pablo Scida provides a case study of how he reengineered a chat server written in Node.js, transforming its original spaghetti code into a cleanly architected and designed piece of software.

Connecting to remote computers and working on them through terminals over a network is something we often take for granted. Technologies that enable us to do this have changed the way we work and have opened doors to amazing possibilities. Although the inner workings of these technologies may seem like obscure knowledge, implementations of many of these technologies are surprisingly straightforward. In this article, Toptal engineer Igor Delac gives us a step-by-step tutorial on how to implement the Remote Framebuffer server-side protocol in Java, allowing Swing-based applications to run and be interacted with remotely using standard VNC clients.

There are a lot of developers who take good care of themselves and enjoy a healthy, active lifestyle. If you are one of them, you can skip the rest of this post, because I wrote it to help developers like myself, who could benefit from a healthier lifestyle.

Even if you are entirely focused on your career, and think you don’t have enough spare time to lead a healthy lifestyle, bear in mind that good physical health will also boost your productivity.

When working on big web applications as a team with other developers, code needs to be scalable and readable. This can be a challenging process when it comes to CSS, although preprocessors like Sass are available. But only using preprocessors will only get you so far. In this article, Toptal engineer Matias Hernandez presents a style guide with advice on how to improve the way you write your code.

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.

Remote jobs can be good for you, but depending on your character, they can also have some unpleasant side effects. Burnout affects people in all walks of life and in all industries, so what makes remote workers different?

Recognizing burnout symptoms early is of vital importance, and I cannot stress this enough. The deeper you sink into it, the longer it will take to recover, it’s as simple as that.

Proper test automation is a challenging yet essential ingredient for quality software applications. Explore maintainable test automation in Selenium, including Page Object model and Page Factory.

Working as a remote software development freelancer has many benefits, but setting up an effective distributed working environment can be a real challenge. In this article, Toptal Engineer Ivan Voras describes how he leverages SSH and a number of related technologies, along with the Raspberry Pi and ownCloud, to be able to work effectively from anywhere.

One of the hardest things to do in software development is to determine how long and how much it will take to deliver a new software product. Should it be so hard? The answer is not straightforward.

WebRTC has opened doors to all kinds of new peer-to-peer web applications and games that can run in the browser without the need of additional plugins. However, being a relatively new technology, it still poses some unique challenges to developers. PeerJS aims to tackle some of those challenges by providing an elegant API and insulating developers from WebRTC’s implementation differences. In this article, Toptal engineer Mahmud Ridwan provides an introductory tutorial to building a simple, peer-to-peer web game using PeerJS.

Here’s the Vulkan API in a hundred words or less: It’s a low-overhead, close-to-metal API for 3D graphics and compute applications. Vulkan is basically a follow-on to OpenGL. It was originally referred to as the “next generation OpenGL initiative,” and it includes a few bits and pieces from AMD’s Mantle API. Vulkan is supposed to provide numerous advantages over other GPU APIs, enabling superior cross-platform support, better support for multithreaded processors, lower CPU load, and a pinch of OS agnosticism.

The Internet is mankind’s biggest repository of knowledge, information, useful (and useless: think of cat pics) digital content. Today, we will be taking a quick look at something useful and down to earth: free online programming books.