Web

REST APIs have become a common way to establish an interface between web back-ends and front-ends, and between different web services. The simplicity of this kind of interface, and the ubiquitous support of the HTTP and HTTPS protocols across different networks and frameworks, makes it an easy choice when considering interoperability issues. Bottle is a minimalist Python web framework. It is lightweight, fast, and easy to use, and is well-suited to building RESTful services. In this article, I'll provide a walkthrough of how to build a RESTful API service using Bottle.

Performance and data interoperability are critical to the success of any web application. For web apps that need to support video processing -- which is inherently compute- and I/O-intensive -- these challenges are particularly acute. In this post, I describe some of my experience successfully incorporating video capabilities into a PHP-based web app, leveraging open source technologies and cloud-based services to the greatest extent possible.

One of the most misused, misunderstood, and neglected of all the Rails built-in structures is the view helper. Helpers often get a bad reputation for being a dumping ground for one-off methods used across the entire application's view layer. But what if your helpers could be more semantic, better organized, and even reusable across projects? What if they could be more than just one-off functions sprinkled throughout the view, but powerful methods that generated complex markup with ease leaving your views free of conditional logic and code? Let's see how to do this when building an image carousel, with the familiar Twitter Bootstrap framework and some good old-fashioned object-oriented programming.

Every once in a while PHP developers are charged with tasks that require them to extend the functionalities of legacy projects, a task that often includes building REST APIs. Building a REST API for PHP-based projects is challenging, but in the absence of proper frameworks and tools, it can also be a particularly difficult goal to get right. In this article, Toptal engineer Arminas Zukauskas shares his advice, with sample code, on how to build a modern structured REST API around existing legacy PHP projects.

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.

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.

Between square inch smart wristwatches and mammoth smart TVs, a responsive website capable of adapting to a wide array of screen sizes and device capabilities is something no one complains about. However, many websites are still plagued by desktop-first design paradigms, or mobile-first paradigms with absolutely no focus on performance. These traditional approaches to responsive web design have various shortcomings. Fortunately, some simple ideas can help solve these problems.

Mastering CSS is an absolute necessity for any solid web designer or developer. This tutorial walks you through the fundamentals of CSS layout principles, from classic CSS2 techniques to the latest approaches in CSS3. Learn more about how to leverage all that CSS has to offer in order to optimize both the user’s experience and the quality of your code.