Node.js

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.

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.

In-memory data collection manipulation is something that we often need to do in data-centric reporting and visualization applications. When needed, we often tend to resort to complex loops, list comprehensions, and other suboptimal means, which can easily end up being a huge mess of hard-to-maintain spaghetti code. Supergroup.js is an in-memory data manipulation library that can be used to solve some common data manipulation challenges on limited datasets.

Programming is about having fun and enjoying the process of creating something cool. That is why we decided to build a bot-vs-bot game platform around Battleship and make it open source. In this article, we take a look at the code and mechanics of the extensible engine behind this platform.

While Ruby has Rails and Python has Django, the dominant application development framework for Node has yet to be established. But, there is a powerful contender gaining steam: LoopBack, an open source API framework built by StrongLoop, the creators of Express. Let's take a closer look at LoopBack and it's capabilities by turning everything into practice and building an example application.

Deploying instances of a web application to one or more servers manually can often be a monotonous process, and take up a significant amount of your time. With little effort, it is possible to automate the process of deploying your web application with almost zero human intervention. This article outlines a simple approach to automating web application deployments using GitHub webhooks, buildpacks, and Procfiles.

Developers often automate certain repetitive and tedious tasks to save time as well as to stay focused on the task at hand. This article demonstrates how simple and easy it is to use Gulp as a build tool.

Node.js, the cross-platform runtime environment, has seen its fair share of praise and criticism for what it offers to developers. Often, reasons for such criticisms are rooted in how developers use/misuse the language. This article explores ten common mistakes that Node.js developers make and how to avoid them.

AllcountJS is an emerging open-source framework built with rapid application development in mind. It is based on the idea of declarative application development using JSON-like configuration code that describes the structure and behavior of the application. In this article, we walk through a step-by-step tutorial for prototyping a data-oriented web application using AllcountJS.