Things Ian Says

Cross Framework Messaging

With the proliferation of Javascript frameworks, I found myself in the situation where I needed two different UI elements — built with two different Javascript frameworks — to communicate with each other.

Rather than choosing to migrate one onto a different framework, I looked at a way of allowing them to send messages to each other using the Mediator Design Pattern.

Using this pattern, I have an example of an Angular app, a React app, and a plain Javascript app communicating.

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Very Light Javascript

I recently needed to put together a quick proof of concept for a small project and decided to use this as an opportunity to try out a lighter than light approach to Javascript I’d been thinking of for a while.

Whilst frameworks like Bootstrap are already quite light, I wanted to see if I could remove even more. With all the Angular 2 kerfuffle, I wanted to look for another framework which I can use instead. I also wanted to drop gulp and just try using npm instead.

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Memoization

Some of my recent blog entries have dealt with using functional practices in Javascript. There are obviously downsides to functional programming as well, and one commonly stated one is around performance. One area this applies to is in the large number of function calls resulting from this approach — particularly when we are writing recursive code. We will give an example of this problem — calculating Fibonacci numbers — and then look at a technique known as memoization as a way of improving performance.

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Functional Example

This blog entry will take the techniques discussed in the previous articles about functional Javascript and currying and apply them to an example problem.

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Curried Javascript

In my previous blog entry, we looked at how functions are first class entities in Javascript, what an anonymous (or lambda) function is, and how we create and use closures. We will now look at another functional technique, known as currying, which builds on those concepts.

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Functional Javascript

Functional programming is seeing an increase in popularity, as can be seen in rising adoption of languages like Scala, Clojure and Erlang. Even Java has introduced lambdas (more about lambdas, later). Javascript supports a functional programming style and I find that working within that style makes many things simpler when developing Javascript. This is particularly true when working with promises. This blog entry discusses some basic functional techniques and demonstrates how they can be used within Javascript. It should be useful to both people who wish to adopt a more functional style in their Javascript, and to people who just want to understand more about functional programming.

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Promises in Javascript

Javascript is single threaded and non-blocking, which means that lines of Javascript code are not necessarily executed in the same order they are written. This can cause problems with asynchronous behaviour, for example if the Javascript needs to call two different APIs in a specific order. This article discusses this challenge, and looks at the use of promises to address them.

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A learning stub server in 40 lines of code

This article demonstrates a simple stub server, written in Javascript, which captures responses as it proxies them to backend services, and can then act as a stub server, serving up those responses as appropriate.

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PhantomJS for client side testing

Please note that PhantomJS has been suspended, so this article is only retained out of historical interest. As web-based projects do more on the client side, conventional server-side performance testing is not able to give you all the performance story. I have, therefore, started looking around for tools which would give more insight into that purely client-side performance.

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Creating vagrant boxes with veewee and packer

This is an old article, and the technologies used in here may have changed significantly since I wrote it. Proceed with caution. I’ve been creating a few vagrant base boxes recently — some for a DevOps course I am putting together, and some for investigations in my current project — and I thought I’d quickly share my experiences of the two tools: veewee and packer.

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