Posts about web applications

This post is the first in a three-part series describing our investigations into scalability for a second screen application we built with PBS. You can read more about the project in the series introduction here. Some Background We built the Map Center second-screen application in Node.js with the help of a number of open-source libraries. […]

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Realtime Node.js App: A Stress Testing Story

• Tagged in:
• deployment,
• performance,
• server side,
• testing,
• web applications

This summer, Bocoup worked with Mozilla and PBS to build an open source, real-time web application for the 2012 US Presidential election. When we began, PBS (specifically, the folks at News Hour) had already completed a client-side application called “Map Center“. Map Center enabled users to view US demographic data and experiment with electoral college […]

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Bocoup & PBS: Building and Scaling a Realtime Node.js Application

• Tagged in:
• deployment,
• tools and workflow,
• web applications

If you’re planning to catch the U.S. presidential debates tonight, you should have a second screen open and a browser pointed to ReConstitution 2012, a web application that we collaborated on with Sosolimited for The Creators Project. ReConstitution 2012 is a live deconstruction of the presidential debates. It scrapes the closed caption data from the […]

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ReConstitution 2012 – Live Debate Deconstruction and Visualization

• Tagged in:
• data analysis,
• data visualization,
• design

One of the most important ways we accomplish our mission to move the Open Web forward is through helping and training web developers. To this end, we’re working to make open web education as accessible as possible via resources such as jqfundamentals.com, our public classes and workshops, and the Essentials Tours we’re bringing to cities […]

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Roost – A JavaScript Training Conference from Bocoup

• Tagged in:
• software development process,
• training,
• web applications

GitHub offers a great feature called WebHook URLs. You can add a url to take advantage of git’s post-receive hook and get a POST request containing data related to a repository push (e.g., commits, tags, and head-resets). While the data is very detailed and thorough, its complexity and focus on mimicking the git operations make […]

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Introducing Gith – GitHub WebHooks For Node

• Tagged in:
• deployment,
• git,
• tools and workflow,
• web applications

We had so much fun with our first Bocoup on Air hangout that we decided to do it again. This time, I chatted with Boaz Sender about a mobile web app he’s been working on, and about the future of the web as an application development platform. Most of our conversation was spent on a […]

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Bocoup on Air: Developing for the Mobile Web

• Tagged in:
• design,
• mobile,
• software development process,
• tools and workflow,
• web applications

Everything you think you know about data binding — and every trick MVC libraries are using to pull it off — is about to be flipped on its head. At the last ECMA/TC39 Face to Face, Rafael Weinstein presented the latest revision of the Object.observe spec, a work in progress that he and several other […]

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JavaScript: Databinding with Object.observe

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• web standards

Building a back-end API layer introduces a whole new layer of coordination between server and client code. While there are many aspects to this delicate dance of communication, one key ingredient to minimizing back-and-forth-confusion-about what-call-does-what, is consistently communicating about your API endpoints. This is by no means rocket science, but over time I’ve created a […]

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REST API Documentation Best Practices

• Tagged in:
• software development process,
• training,
• tutorial,
• web applications

The things we’re asking JavaScript to do are getting more and more complex by the day, and that means that manual testing — the good old “click around and make sure nothing’s broken” — is becoming less and less effective. If you’ve run into this in your work, you probably know that you ought to […]

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New Training: Writing Testable JavaScript

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• testing,
• training

I got to hear some great presentations and have some great conversations at last week’s inaugural Backbone Conf, and one thing that came up over and over again was how to effectively communicate between views in client-side applications. There are lots of patterns for doing this — and we love talking patterns at Bocoup — […]

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Communicating Between Views in Client-Side Apps

• Tagged in:
• client side,
• performance,
• web applications