Category: Languages, Tools & Frameworks

The single-threaded, event-loop based concurrency model of JavaScript, deals with processing of events using so-called “asynchronous non-blocking I/O model.” Unlike computer languages such as Java, where events are handled using additional threads, processed in parallel with the main execution thread, JavaScript code is executed sequentially. In order to prevent blocking the main thread on I/O-bound…

Here’s a handy list of commonly-used terms, acronyms and buzzwords that you’ll need to know if working with or within the world of software development, digital design and open source. Whether you are a business-user needing to understand the meaning of the tools, technologies & methodologies used by your IT department or a developer exploring…

Animating your React apps doesn’t have to be a hassle. With these helpful components and prebuilt animation keyframes, you’ll be adding animation to your apps in no time. Animating is difficult We often forget about how animation is going to feature into our web projects. It’s easy to let this happen – designs tend to…

‘React Browser Hooks’ is an Open Source library containing several custom hooks that integrate with common browser functionality. The Problem & Our Motivation Often browser events and functions are directly added to components, which can: Add significantly to a component’s footprint Dilute the core functionality and purity of the component leading to less readable code…

Utility-first CSS is the notion of composing many small utilitarian classes together. With this, the aim is to allow you to create robust, scalable and responsive user interfaces for the web. Tailwind is a CSS framework that provides a suite of utility classes out of the box. It also allows you to compose and add…

Twenty years ago I worked for a bank converting Clipper 5 code into Visual Basic as part of Y2K migrations.  I was young and impressionable and I remember my manager said to me, “If something is getting too complex, there’s probably a better way!” Complexity can be a significant barrier for developers considering a new…

What are Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)? With the widespread adoption of HTML5 standards, the lines between native and web applications are becoming more blurry. Now, increasing native features have become available for the browsers, making it difficult to decide whether to build a native or web application. Here at NearForm we love pushing the boundaries…

One of the standard infrastructure architectural patterns for web applications – that we also apply here at NearForm – is to split the infrastructure into multiple logical environments. The most common ones are dev, staging and production. They use the same type of resources (load balancers, instances, databases, etc), but they differ in scale and…

In a previous article, we described how to build a Docker Registry. Today we look at Clair – a tool that does static analysis of vulnerabilities in a docker image. What is Clair? Clair is a popular open source vulnerability scanning solution for docker images made by CoreOS. Clair is also integrated with quay.io public…