Toptal Engineering Blog

More and more people are moving their work from desktop applications to the cloud using an equivalent online web application. However, this has unfortunately not been true for software development IDEs. Although there have been some attempts to provide an online IDE, they have not come anywhere close to traditional IDEs.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Michele Sciabarra guides us on how to build a cloud-based development environment for Scala and big data applications, with the help of Docker in Amazon AWS.

Although database programming does not evolve at nearly the same pace as traditional application programming, recent advancements in several fields are bringing new techniques and technologies within the reach of small and independent developers.

In this guide, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Jeffrey Shumaker explains how developers can quickly and easily tap these methods to identify database issues they may not even be aware of, and how they can build excellent data mining tools without spending a lot on expensive software licenses.

Manual memory management is a nightmare that programmers have been inventing ways to avoid since the invention of the compiler. Programming languages with garbage collectors make life easier, but at the cost of performance.

In this article, Toptal engineer Peter Goodspeed-Niklaus gives us a peek into the history of garbage collectors and explains how notions of ownership and borrowing can help eliminate garbage collectors without compromising their safety guarantees.

EhCache is a widely used, pure Java cache that can be easily integrated with most popular Java frameworks, such as Spring and Hibernate. It is often considered to be the most convenient choice for Java applications since it can be integrated into projects easily. EhCache Spring Annotations allows seamless integration into any Spring application by simply adding annotations to cacheable methods without modifying the method implementations. This article focuses on boosting your Spring applications with EhCache Spring Annotations.

Google Cardboard was envisioned as the cheapest Virtual Reality (VR) solution on the planet, and at this point, nothing else comes close in terms of pricing. However, the low price did not bring about mass adoption, and Google’s Android-based VR platform is nothing more than a tech curiosity at this point.

In this post, Toptal Technical Editor Nermin Hajdarbegovic leverages his extensive experience in the graphics industry to explain what’s keeping Cardboard VR down, and what the platform needs to attract more users, investment, and development.

Java Virtual Machine (JVM), the powerful virtual machine behind programming languages like Java and Scala, provides a platform-independent environment for executing compiled bytecode. Programming languages built for the JVM can be used to write programs that can run on a wide range of platforms without modification and can even leverage all the libraries and frameworks that exist for the JVM.

In this article, Toptal engineer Federico Tomassetti presents an overview of the strategy and various tools involved in creating our very own programming language for the JVM.

In this article, Toptal engineer Ivan Voras provides a useful overview and comparison of multi-processing network server models, with the goal being to take some of the mystery out of writing high performance networking code. The article is intended for “system programmers”, i.e., back-end developers who will work with the low-level details of their applications, implementing network server code.