Front-end

JavaScript is much more nuanced than most developers initially realize. Even for those with more experience, some of JavaScript's most salient features continue to be misunderstood and lead to confusion. One such feature, described in this article, is the way that property and variable lookups are performed and the resulting performance ramifications to be aware of.

I often hear iOS developers ask some variant of the same key question: "What's the best way to develop a UI in iOS: through Storyboards, NIBs, or code?" Answers to this question, explicitly or implicitly, tend to assume that there's a mutually exclusive choice to be made, one that is often addressed upfront, before development. I'm of the opinion that there's no single choice to be made. Rather, each option has its strengths and weaknesses—and there's no need to use any one of them in isolation.

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.

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.

RWD allows a site to adapt for optimal viewing on a variety of devices that range in size based on a media query for mobile and other screen widths. 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).

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.