JavaScript

The Internet is becoming “smarter” every day. The video-sharing website that you frequently visit seems to know exactly what you will like, even before you have seen it. The online shopping cart holding your items almost magically figures out the one thing that you may have missed or intended to add before checking out. It’s as if these web services are reading your mind---or are they? Turns out, predicting a user’s likes involves more math than magic. In this article we explore one of the many ways of building a recommendation engine that is both simple to implement and understand.

In our previous post on the GWT Web Toolkit, we discussed the strengths and characteristics of GWT to mix Java and JavaScript libraries seamlessly in the browser. In today's post, we would like to go a little deeper and see the GWT Toolkit in action. We'll demonstrate how we can take advantage of GWT to build a peculiar application: an augmented reality web application that runs in real time, fully in JavaScript, in the browser. We'll focus on how GWT gives us the ability to interact easily with many JavaScript APIs, such as WebRTC and WebGL, and allows us to harness a large Java library, NyARToolkit, never intended to be used in the browser.

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.

There are many programming platforms used to develop games, and there are a plethora of devices to play them on, but when it comes to playing games in a web browser, Flash-based development still leads the way. What if we could port these games to HTML5 Canvas technology and play them on mobile browsers as well? In this article, Toptal engineer Avinash Kaza gave a solution to this.

Since almost all smartphones today are equipped with location sensors, motion sensors, bluetooth, and wifi, today's mobile apps can use context awareness to dramatically increase their capabilities and value. This article walks you through building a context aware app that employs complex event processing.

One of the biggest and most common problems in front-end web development is state management. A developer is constantly focused on keeping the state object in sync with its view and the DOM representation. Users can interact with the application in many ways and it's a big task to provide a clean transition from one view state to another. We will see how using React JavaScript library can help us reduce application complexity and offload UI transitions from our application.

This article provides step by step guide for building hybrid multiplatform real-time mobile application using the Ionic Framework and the Firebase.

Data Driven Documents, or D3.js, is an awesome data visualization library. In this article, I'll discuss one particularly compelling application of D3.js: map making. We'll go through the common challenges of building a useful and informative web map, and show how in each case, D3.js gives you everything you need to make your map look and feel beautiful.

As mobile and tablet devices come closer to achieving final world domination, web technology is in a race to accommodate the ever-growing number screen sizes. However, devising tools to meet the challenges of this phenomenon brings a whole new set of problems, with one of the latest buzzwords to emerge being "responsive web".