Author Posts - Web Development

Introduction The world of software development is constantly evolving, and one of the most significant shifts in recent years has been the move from monolithic architectures to microservices. In his book "Building Microservices with Node.js: Explore Microservices Applications and Migrate from a Monolith Architecture to Microservices," Daniel Kapexhiu offers a comprehensive guide for developers who wish to understand and implement microservices using Node.js. This article delves into the book's key themes, including an analysis of Node.js as a technology, best practices for JavaScript in microservices, and the unique insights that Kapexhiu brings to the table. Node.js: The Backbone of Modern Microservices Node.js has gained immense popularity as a runtime environment for building scalable network applications, particularly in the realm of microservices. It is built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine and uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model, which makes it lightweight and efficient. These characteristics are essential when dealing with microservices, where performance and scalability are paramount. The author effectively highlights why Node.js is particularly suited for microservices architecture. First, its asynchronous nature allows microservices to handle multiple requests concurrently without being bogged down by long-running processes. This is crucial in a microservices environment where each service should be independently scalable and capable of handling a high load. Moreover, Node.js has a vast ecosystem of libraries and frameworks, such as Express.js and Koa.js, which simplifies the development of microservices. These tools provide a solid foundation for building RESTful APIs, which are often the backbone of microservices communication. The author emphasizes the importance of choosing the right tools within the Node.js ecosystem to ensure that microservices are not only performant but also maintainable and scalable. Best Practices for JavaScript in Microservices While Node.js provides a robust platform for building microservices, the importance of adhering to JavaScript best practices cannot be overstated. In his book, the author provides a thorough analysis of the best practices for JavaScript when working within a microservices architecture. These best practices are designed to ensure code quality, maintainability, and scalability. One of the core principles the author advocates is the use of modularity in code. JavaScript’s flexible and dynamic nature allows developers to break down applications into smaller, reusable modules. This modular approach aligns perfectly with the microservices architecture, where each service is a distinct, self-contained module. By adhering to this principle, developers can create microservices that are easier to maintain and evolve over time. The author also stresses the importance of following standard coding conventions and patterns. This includes using ES6/ES7 features such as arrow functions, destructuring, and async/await, which not only make the code more concise and readable but also improve its performance. Additionally, he underscores the need for rigorous testing, including unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests, to ensure that each microservice behaves as expected. Another crucial aspect this book covers is error handling. In a microservices architecture, where multiple services interact with each other, robust error handling is essential to prevent cascading failures. The book provides practical examples of how to implement effective error-handling mechanisms in Node.js, ensuring that services can fail gracefully and recover quickly. Problem-Solving with Microservices Transitioning from a monolithic architecture to microservices is not without its challenges. The author does not shy away from discussing the potential pitfalls and complexities that developers might encounter during this transition. He offers practical advice on how to decompose a monolithic application into microservices, focusing on identifying the right boundaries between services and ensuring that they communicate efficiently. One of the key challenges in a microservices architecture is managing data consistency across services. The author addresses this issue by discussing different strategies for managing distributed data, such as event sourcing and the use of a centralized message broker. He provides examples of how to implement these strategies using Node.js, highlighting the trade-offs involved in each approach. Another common problem in microservices is handling cross-cutting concerns such as authentication, logging, and monitoring. The author suggests solutions that involve leveraging middleware and service mesh technologies to manage these concerns without introducing tight coupling between services. This allows developers to maintain the independence of each microservice while still addressing the broader needs of the application. Unique Insights and Experiences What sets this book apart is the depth of practical insights and real-world experiences that he shares. This book goes beyond the theoretical aspects of microservices and Node.js to provide concrete examples and case studies from his own experiences in the field. These insights are invaluable for developers who are embarking on their microservices journey. For instance, the author discusses the importance of cultural and organizational changes when adopting microservices. He explains how the shift to microservices often requires changes in team structure, development processes, and even the way developers think about code. By sharing his experiences with these challenges, the author helps readers anticipate and navigate the broader implications of adopting microservices. Moreover, the author offers guidance on the operational aspects of microservices, such as deploying, monitoring, and scaling microservices in production. He emphasizes the need for automation and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to manage the complexity of deploying multiple microservices. His advice is grounded in real-world scenarios, making it highly actionable for developers. Conclusion "Building Microservices with Node.js: Explore Microservices Applications and Migrate from a Monolith Architecture to Microservices" by Daniel Kapexhiu is an essential read for any developer looking to understand and implement microservices using Node.js. The book offers a comprehensive guide that covers both the technical and operational aspects of microservices, with a strong emphasis on best practices and real-world problem-solving. The author’s deep understanding of Node.js as a technology, combined with his practical insights and experiences, makes this book a valuable resource for anyone looking to build scalable, maintainable, and efficient microservices. Whether you are just starting your journey into microservices or are looking to refine your existing microservices architecture, this book provides the knowledge and tools you need to succeed. Author BioDaniel Kapexhiu is a software developer with over 6 years of working experience developing web applications using the latest technologies in frontend and backend development. Daniel has been studying and learning software development for about 12 years and has extended expertise in programming. He specializes in the JavaScript ecosystem, and is always updated about new releases of ECMAScript. He is ever eager to learn and master the new tools and paradigms of JavaScript.

Vue occupies an interesting position in the triumvirate of frontend JavaScript frameworks. Not hyped to the extent that React is, and not as established as Angular, it’s spent the last couple of years quietly minding its business and building an engaged and enthusiastic community of developers. One of these developers is Marina Mosti: her book Building Forms with Vue.js is just the latest step in her career journey from a backend developer getting frustrated with Java to Vue.js evangelist and educator. She’s a great person to explain the attraction of Vue.js, and to provide an insight into how she first entered the community - luckily, I was able to chat with her. Buy Building Forms with Vue.js on the Packt store. Her background is interesting: “I actually started out as a PHP developer and found myself in a position where I forced myself into learning front end. It’s not until very recently that I started doing front end in terms of it being my main focus” she says. Rather than moving deeper down into the stack, she has gone the other way, gravitating towards the front end. That might not be completely conventional, but it’s also indicative of the evolution of both JavaScript and frontend development in general. Read the first chapter of the book for free on the Packt platform. Rethinking JavaScript Things today, Marina suggests, are quite different. She’s quick to tell me, for example, that “the current state of JavaScript is just so much better than what it used to be,” and recalls a general antipathy towards JavaScript in the early years of her career that she “dragged… around for many years.” “I went to this very small school where they taught us the basics of front end development” she explains. “And for good or for bad the teachers were always very adamant about saying ‘oh don’t bother learning vanilla JavaScript because we have jQuery and vanilla JavaScript is so bad that you’re not gonna use it.’” However, the framework boom changed this. “I got to a point where all these cool frameworks were coming out and you just realise ‘hey I don’t know javascript; I know jquery so how do I make this jump?’” This ‘jump’ wasn’t without challenges. “Just having to go back and learn the basics - that has been the most ‘challenging’ part of going onto front end - because the front end that I knew [at the time] was php side-generated HTML code with maybe a little bit of javascript, maybe some CSS.” Read next: Vue maintainers proposed, listened, and revised the RFC for hooks in Vue API Laravel and Vue.js Marina explains that she first encountered Vue while using Laravel. “We... wanted to take advantage of this built-in connection that Vue had with Laravel. Obviously this didn’t involve any fancy set up, there was no vue CLI, nothing of this good pre-compiling or anything, it was just injecting vue into the html and creating the components there on the fly” However, discovering Vue in this way proved to be revelatory: it actually underlined what makes it, in Marina’s view, a great front end framework. “You don’t really have to commit to the whole framework,” she says; “it just got the job done for what I needed at that moment.” What problems can Vue.js solve? Marina has a pretty clear perspective on the challenges in front end development. “The problems we’re currently facing in front end development... is that people don’t want the old browsing experience where you’re clicking around and having to wait for reloads” she says. “We want to make applications… that are very performant, they have a great user experience, you are not waiting for page refreshes - it flows. What we are looking for is having your applications flow in a way that makes sense, like if you were using a desktop application.” Vue is particularly good for this, Marina explains, because of its “reusable component structure.” To a certain extent, this way of working is just another example of the wider trend across engineering towards breaking things apart. “You are trying to make these small units of code, that do this specific thing… a very common way to describe it is like this lego system where you’re just putting pieces on top of each other and it just starts making sense.” I’ve heard that analogy before in relation to containers - there’s clearly a recurring theme that’s evolving out of core principles of design. If Vue is well-suited to building lightweight but highly performant front ends, another important element is that it makes development relatively easy. Again, Marina contrasts working with Vue today with what JavaScript development looked like in the past. “You used to have... these massive massive amounts of code, and code separation of concerns was just very complicated to manage. You had to [do] a lot of overhead and work... trying to figure out how are we going to structure these files so that it makes sense.” The Vue CLI Tooling was also more complicated; something that the Vue CLI has helped to solve.“You had to deal with - at a very intricate level - how tools like Grunt worked, for example. And now you have like these pre-build tools like the Vue CLI which allow you to not have to really think about things," she says. “You don’t have to think like ‘hey, how is this going to get compiled? How is webpack going to figure things out?’ At least not at an entry level because you have it all neatly packed in this box for you with the Vue CLI.” Comparing Vue.js to React and Angular Although it’s clear that Marina is incredibly passionate and enthusiastic about Vue, she’s also circumspect about ranking JavaScript frameworks against each other. “All 3 frameworks are fantastic. All 3 get the job done. This is like asking someone why is this your favorite flavor of ice cream?!” Vue.js v. React She notes that React and Vue have a lot in common. “They share a lot of similarities - both of them use a virtual DOM… they both have this reactive component structure.” However, the key difference, from Marina’s perspective, is JSX. “If you’re talking about React, you’re talking about JSX, this approach where everything is javascript. You’re writing HTML inside the JavaScript, you’re writing CSS inside the JavaScript.” It’s JSX that puts Marina off React, saying that the way it requires you to work “doesn’t really click. I know how to do it, but just in the way I like to code things I prefer just having the separation where HTML is HTML, and where CSS is CSS.” Want to learn React.js? Search the latest React eBooks and videos. Read next: Ionic React released; Ionic Framework pivots from Angular to a native React version Vue.js v. Angular Angular, meanwhile, is “great for enterprise projects where you need this huge huge framework” says Marina. “But that also comes at a cost of having to know all the framework. All the libraries, everything that Angular brings to the table, you have to know TypeScript - it's just very opinionated at what it does and sometimes the shoe is going to be very big for the project.” So, for Marina, Vue has a degree of flexibility. It’s not as opinionated as Angular, and it doesn’t require you to write using JSX. “It can grow up until the point you need it to… From the smallest component in your application to powering full enterprise solutions.” And related to this, it means Vue is accessible - the learning curve isn’t that steep. “Vue is just very gentle in that you can start using it; you can start building things right away.” “There's a very good pay off in making yourself an expert in it... once you start getting into the core of Vue, and understanding all the little tools that are at your disposal… you can start building upon this knowledge... the framework can grow and adjust to what you’re needing.” Search the latest Angular eBooks and videos. The Vue.js community There are undoubtedly many technical reasons to consider using Vue. However, another aspect that Marina emphasises throughout our conversation is how welcoming and supportive the Vue community is. “The Vue community is one of the biggest selling points of why you should pick Vue and why Vue is so amazing.” The Vue community was, Marina says, integral in getting her to where she is now. “I was, at one point, not very into vue… and I just found a very welcoming community and a very inclusive community... People in the community care about other developers that are getting into Vue. We try our best to make this feel like a very safe, inclusive community to just get people in here and get them developing vue and help them out with the problems they’re having.” Marina deserves credit for playing a part in fostering a welcoming and supportive culture. Not only has she created a wealth of learning materials (such as a great free introductory tutorial series), she also works closely with Vue Vixens, and provides mentoring and support for other women finding their way in the industry. “This focus on education just basically became my goal… Hey, let’s do things to teach people, to get more people involved with vue,” she says. In an industry that’s sometimes defined by hyper-competitiveness, and marred by toxicity, it’s certainly a worthwhile and important goal. It’s something we can all work at. Follow Marina Mosti on Twitter: @MarinaMosti Follow Vue Vixens on Twitter: @VueVixens

Back in February, Viktor Charypar, Tech Director at Red badger explained the benefits of using a monorepo. For many teams, especially those without the resources or a highly developed and well-supported engineering culture, the idea of a monorepo might sound a little strange - following on from this piece, I spoke to Viktor to get a little bit more detail on the benefits of a monorepo and why engineering teams should seriously consider using them. But I didn't just speak to him about monorepos - I was also interested in how Red Badger builds a forward thinking engineering culture that can empower its clients, and how the team embraces continuous learning to ensure everyone is on top of the trends and tools that are going to be impacting digital transformation in the future. So, let's take a look at what Viktor had to say... Why monorepos now? Richard Gall: Why a monorepo now? If you’re dealing with multiple microservices doesn’t it make sense to separate source code? Viktor Charypar: It would seem to make sense, but microservices architecture actually introduces a new level of complexity that needs to be managed, which monorepos make much easier. The main issue is in dependencies between the services and the contracts they agree to exchange data. If one side of the contract changes in an incompatible way without the other side adapting to that change, the system no longer works. This problem grows with the number of services in the system and so it’s especially prominent in microservices architectures. Managing each service’s source code in a separate repository makes it more difficult to understand its ties to the rest of the system. This forces you to adopt some kind of external versioning scheme, such as semantic versioning, to express which revisions of services work together as things change. These versions are decided by engineers manually as changes are made according to a set of rules, and then the dependent services are updated to refer to the latest version of the service they consume, when they are changed to be compatible. This is time-consuming and error-prone. In a monorepo, all the components of the system are versioned together and changes can be made across the system. This not only means an external versioning scheme is not required, but it also makes it easier to test and enforce contracts between services. Monorepos really come to their own when they are coupled with a Continuous Integration system aware of the dependencies between components in the repo. Given a change made by a developer and the knowledge of the dependency “graph”, we can deterministically decide which system components can be affected by the change and therefore need to be retested. It is then up to owners of each service to do a level of testing of their dependencies to make sure their behaviour didn’t change significantly enough to break their own functionality. All this is automated and can be executed without human intervention. Humans just make changes to the software and express expectations on their dependencies in terms of contracts and tests. Read next: Mozilla’s updated policies will ban extensions with obfuscated code Digital transformation challenges RG: What common problems are clients coming to you with? VC: In general, our clients recognise they need help with their digital product capabilities, i.e. delivering interesting propositions to their customers as digital products, typically websites and mobile apps. In large enterprise companies, this ability is generally predicated on going through a digital transformation - adopting agile delivery methods, breaking down functional silos and working in cross-discipline, vertically aligned teams that can decide things quickly and adapt to how customers respond to their product offering. Our clients typically come to us with one of a few problems ranging from needing help with product strategy, i.e. what to offer their customers and how to find which of the many ideas have a market fit. Through knowing what to do but struggling to deliver it at pace, all the way to already having a digital product offering, but one which doesn’t perform as expected. Either from the perspective of customer behaviour (e.g. low conversion rate) or from a technical quality perspective, i.e. the website is unstable, struggles under high load, there are long outages, etc. While our strength is traditionally in fast product delivery and quality, we can help across the board, from product strategy to what we call empower and embed - demonstrating how to deliver digital products quickly, sustainably and with high quality, helping to build internal capability and then handing over to them. Essentially we want to help our clients build sustainable businesses. Read next: Linux forms Urban Computing Foundation: Set of open source tools to build autonomous vehicles and smart infrastructure Learning and assessing new software and tools RG: How do you stay on top of new tools? Do you have a learning culture at Red Badger? VC: We absolutely do, from simple day to day things like all engineers being encouraged to pair program to learn from each other or everyone in the company having a yearly training budget as one of the benefits, to doing things like a yearly internal mini conference called Tech Lab for all the engineers to get together and share latest learnings and general experience from projects. We have actually recently published a report which started with an activity at the last Tech Lab, which answers a lot of the questions above. It’s available on our website here (and we’ll also follow it with a series of events). We also run a few regular meetups in London, the biggest being the London React Meetup, which we’ve been hosting regularly for about four years. RG: How do you assess tools? VC: There are a few things we generally look at. The first is obviously experimenting with the tool to work out what it does and how. We’re in a privileged position of starting new projects, often greenfield ones, fairly regularly. We typically use about 80% of tools we know and trust and about 20% of new ones, which we want to try out “in anger” and learn about. We also look at who is behind these tools, which are generally open source, and whether there is momentum behind them and support from the community. Open source software typically goes through a period of rapid innovation and competition in a certain area and then, eventually, the community settles on a few options that work the best and fit the different problems people are trying to solve. The future of open source - is it sustainable? RG: How do you see the future of open source - is it sustainable on its current model? VC: That’s an interesting thing to think about! It seems like the open source model is widely misunderstood as software being built by dedicated developers in their free time. But in reality, most large, popular open source projects are backed by large software companies and people maintain them as their day job - for example, Linux, Kubernetes, React. Even the web standards are set by standard bodies comprised of professionals supported by the major browser vendors. I think the model with a sole maintainer working on something in their spare time doesn’t really work if their project gets very popular and the demand on their time grows. We all know how people tend to behave on the internet and software industry is no exception, so maintainers who do it as a hobby are at a pretty high risk of burning out. For the major open source projects, this seems to be more of an exception, as they are typically maintained by a team of people employed by a company invested in the project. The sponsor benefits from the community contributions and, if the project gets popular, from controlling the direction of a de facto standard and the community benefits from someone else doing the lion’s share of the work. I look at it as being similar to science, where different people publicly contribute to push the boundaries of knowledge, just because pooling resources makes more sense and doesn’t stop any individual contributor from profiting on the results. In that sense, I think it’s a pretty sustainable model and leads to better quality, more versatile software.

How will web and app development evolve in 2019? What are some of the key technologies that you should be investigating if you want to stay up to date in the new year? And what can give you a competitive advantage? This post should help you get the lowdown on some of the shifting trends to be aware of, but I also sat down to discuss some of these issues with my colleague Stacy in the second Packt podcast. https://soundcloud.com/packt-podcasts/why-the-stack-will-continue-to-shrink-for-app-and-web-developers-in-2019 Let us know what you think - and if there's anything you'd like us to discuss on future podcasts, please get in touch!

Too often, as designers and developers we fail to make interfaces that are usable, fail to make software that is intuitive, and fail to make products that normal people can understand. By coating design rigour with a layer of brand fluff, and putting form over function again and again, we build products that serve nobody but the internal needs of our corporations and brands. In this interview with Will Grant, a web technology entrepreneur and veteran, we discuss ways to solve 101 UX design problems clearly and single-mindedly. We also discuss about his upcoming book 101 UX Principles, in which Will has defined and refined what it means to build products people intuitively know how to use. Author’s Bio Will Grant is a British UI/UX expert and graduate of Birmingham City University, where he studied human computer interaction and usable design. Following his degree, he trained with Jakob Nielsen and Bruce Tognazzini, pioneers in UX design. Will has been building intuitive usable software products since the birth of the consumer web over 20 years ago, through to the present day, where Will's work has reached more than a billion users. He is the co-founder and the design lead at UX-focused analytics tool Prodlytic. Key takeaways: The vast majority of UX is still about concepts, journey and the tasks we help users to achieve. The tools to deliver great UX have changed, but UX is still about familiarity, consistency and empathy. The 101 UX Principles are a shortcut for UX professionals. Designers can apply them to their products and make usable software 99% of the time for 99% of users. Over reliance on ‘brand’ and internal goals, trying to reinvent the wheel, and forgetting to put oneself in the place of the user are some common reasons why UX design fails. Many UX people forget that design – UI design in particular – isn’t art, it’s design to perform a function: to serve users. Follow Will’s 10 commandments for effective UX design to create more usable and successful products. There’s another 91 in the book 101 UX Principles too. Full Interview Of the 100+ UX design principles that you explore in your new book, if we asked you to pick the top 10, what would those be? Will’s 10 commandments for effective UX design, so to speak. Test with real users Don’t join the dark side Make your buttons look like buttons Label your icon buttons Use 2 font families, maximum Make ‘blank slates’ more than just empty views Hide ‘advanced’ settings from most users Decide if an interaction should be obvious, easy, or possible Anyone can be a UX professional Use device-native input features where possible Just following these 10 and applying them to your software design will create more usable, successful products. There’s another 91 great commandments in the book too. Will, as this book is about 101 UX Principles, what makes your principles right? Nothing is perfect, but these principles are a ‘shortcut’ for UX professionals. Instead of reinventing the wheel, designers can apply these principles to their products and make usable software 99% of the time for 99% of users. I’ve spent over 20 years, since the birth of the consumer web, building interfaces for 100s of products and over a billion users. My approach isn’t perfect, but it has been tested and proven to work at scale. This guide will help you avoid common mistakes and start with a product that’s extremely usable and intuitive - for the widest possible section of users. Why do people keep making UX mistakes? It’s usually a combination of factors; over reliance on ‘brand’ and internal goals, trying to reinvent the wheel, and forgetting to put yourself in the place of the user. Too often the internal goals of an organisation supercede the design teams who are genuinely trying to ‘fight for the user’. The CEO wants it to look a certain way (but he/she has no design background), or the marketing team decide that a certain typeface has to be used (even though it’s unreadable). The paradox is that, as UX and UI people, we’re over-exposed to components, controls, patterns and interfaces in general. It’s the curse of knowledge and we are the last people who should be designing interfaces — unless we can do the hard bit: objectivity. Name a big company that gets UX right, and one that gets it wrong This is impossible, even today after 20+ years of consumer web products, the experience people see is wildly different from product to product - regardless of the company. Generally, large companies with lots of internal bureaucracy and hierarchy produce end products that are the least usable - this is where small, nimble startups can often produce a better product: not because they are ‘better’ overall, but because they haven’t yet lost sight of the importance of UX. And, crucially, startup teams are less encumbered by legacy baggage and are more free to follow best practice in design. Who inspires you the most with the UX community? Donald Norman & Jakob Nielsen have both been hugely influential to me. Don Norman’s book “The design of everyday things”  pretty much kicked off and ‘invented’ the whole field of human-computer interaction, which these days we call ‘UX’. Nielsen & Norman are sometimes derided as ‘too purist’ but that’s what appeals to me most. Stripping back interfaces to the bare minimum, removing clutter and making things simple are things I try to do in my work every day. I worked for a boss in my early 20’s - he wasn’t a designer - but he did fly into an apoplectic rage at the slightest mistake I might make. It taught me to check, check and re-check my designs and despite him being a horrible person, my work is better for it. What was the last app that made you throw down your phone in frustration? Easy - it was the HSBC app, yesterday, with it’s dreadful ‘update’ process. Apple have gone to great lengths to build an App Store which auto-updates your apps, in the background while you’re asleep and your phone is on charge. HSBC decided that their banking app should do its own half-assed updates, whenever it feels like it, inside the app - just when you open the app and you’re about to use it. A classic example of reinventing the wheel, building a new experience that fails because nobody has thought of the user - only of their internal needs. In your more than two decades of UX design experience, how has the web evolved from a user experience perspective? What were some of the biggest surprises in UX design trends for you? What design ideas have remained unaltered by time? I think it’s remarkable how little has changed - in terms of design ideas that ‘just work’ at least. Yes, software has changed massively over that time - from basic websites and browsers on desktop computers through to web app and native apps on smartphones and tablets. However, the vast majority of UX is still about the concepts, the journey and the tasks you’re helping the user to achieve. The tools to deliver great UX have changed, but UX itself is still about familiarity, consistency and empathy. With emerging technologies like machine learning, AR, VR, IoT etc increasingly impacting how we design for the web, where do you see UX design heading in the coming years? What are some general rules worth keeping in mind when designing for the future? What are some opportunities and challenges you foresee for UX designers? It's more of a hope than a prediction, but perhaps us designers will stop doing things because we can and start asking if we should. A greater sense of social responsibility, and a reduction in sneaky 'dark pattern' UX would be great for everyone. Somewhere along the way, many UX people forgot that design – UI design in particular – isn’t art, it’s design to perform a function: to serve users. Too many designers are slavishly following the latest design trend, applying ‘flat design’ to every app, or trying to be different for the sake of it, with custom-designed interfaces and arbitrary visual metaphors. The solution is simple, too: try and be objective, fight for the user, and test with real users as you go. 101 UX Principles provides 101 ways to solve 101 UX problems clearly and single-mindedly. There are 1000s of methods to apply to each and every interaction in your product, but this book is a ‘shortcut’ to a method that works. The book is available to pre-order now and is expected to be published soon. What UX designers can teach Machine Learning Engineers? To start with: Model Interpretability Is your web design responsive? A UX strategy is worthless without a solid usability test plan    

The hype around blockchain has now reached fever pitch. Now the Bitcoin bubble has all but burst, it would seem that the tech world - and beyond - is starting to think more creatively about how blockchain can be applied. We've started to see blockchain being applied in a huge range of areas; that's likely to grow over the next year or so. We certainly weren't surprised to see blockchain rated highly by many developers working in a variety of fields in this year's Skill Up survey. Around 70% of all respondents believe that blockchain is going to prove to be revolutionary. Read the Skill Up report in full. Sign up to our weekly newsletter and download the PDF for free. To help us make sense of the global enthusiasm and hype for blockchain, we spoke to blockchain expert Imran Bashir. Imran is the author of Mastering blockchain, so we thought he could offer some useful insights into where blockchain is going next. He didn't disappoint. Respondents to the Skill Up survey said that blockchain would be revolutionary. Do you agree? Why? I agree. The fundamental issue that blockchain solves is that of trust. It enables two or more mutually distrusting parties to transact with each other without the need of establishing trust and a trusted third party. This phenomenon alone is enough to start a revolution. Generally, we perform transactions in a centralised and trusted environment, which is a norm and works reasonably well but think about a system where you do not need trust or a central trusted third party to do business. This paradigm fundamentally changes the way we conduct business and results in significant improvements such as cost saving, security and transparency. Why should developers learn blockchain? Do you think blockchain technology is something the average developer should be learning? Why? Any developer should learn blockchain technology because in the next year or so there will be a high demand for skilled blockchain developers/engineers. Even now there are many unfilled jobs, it is said that there are 14 jobs open for every blockchain developer. The future will be built on blockchain; every developer/technologist should strive to learn it. What most excites you about blockchain technology? It is the concept of decentralisation and its application in almost every industry ranging from finance and government to medical and law. We will see applications of this technology everywhere. It will change our lives; just the way Internet did in the 1990s. Also, smart contracts constitute a significant part of blockchain technology, and it allows you to implement Contracts that are automatically executable an enforceable. This ability of blockchain allows you drastically reduce the amount of time it takes for contract enforcement and eliminates the need for third parties and manual processes that can take a long time to come into action. Enforcement in the real world takes a long time, in blockchain world, it is reduced to few minutes, if not seconds, depending on the application and requirements. What tools do you need to learn to take advantage of blockchain? What tools do you think are essential to master in order to take advantage of blockchain? Currently, I think there are some options available. blockchain platforms such as Ethereum and Hyperledger fabric are the most commonly used for development. As such, developers should focus on at least one of these platforms. It is best to start with necessary tools and features available in a blockchain, and once you have mastered the concepts, you can move to using frameworks and APIs, which will ease the development and deployment of decentralised applications. What do you think will be the most important thing for developers to learn in the next 12 months? Learn blockchain technology and at least one related platform. Also explore how to implement business solutions using blockchain which results in bringing about benefits of blockchain such as security, cost-saving and transparency. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us Imran! You can find Imran's book on the Packt store.

This year's Skill Up survey produced some interesting results when it came to the best front end frameworks. Angular remains the most established tool with 40% of web developers reporting that they used it regularly. React is actually a little further behind, with 25% using it regularly. Similarly, Vue.js is growing but used by 20% of respondents. However, opinion was a little different when we asked what front end frameworks should win the battle of the 3 big front end tools. Respondents were split on Angular and React, with both JavaScript tools winning 34% of the vote. Vue wasn't far behind, at just over 30%. With the web development world apparently split over what framework is going to define the future of the field, how are we to pick them apart? Or do we even really need to worry? Read the report in full. Sign up to our weekly newsletter and download the PDF for free. The fact that we have three great front end tools jostling for developer attention is surely a good thing, right? To help us make sense of these trends, we caught up with Angular expert Minko Gechev to find out what he makes of web development in 2018, and what front end developers should be learning. Minko Gechev is the author of Switching Angular. You can find the latest edition here on the Packt Store. Which front end framework should you learn: Angular, React, or Vue? Respondents to the Skill Up survey were evenly split between Angular, React, and Vue in the 'battle of the frameworks'. Which do you think developers should learn, and why? In all of them, there are unique and interesting ideas which are worth exploring. I truly believe that learning all the major frameworks can help developers go to the next level! This doesn’t necessary mean to be proficient in all of them. Having a high-level understanding of how the frameworks work and how to use them is completely enough and will allow you to adapt according to the projects’ requirements. This is similar to learning programming languages from different paradigms – it helps you discover how problems are being solved in different ways. For the past a couple of years, the redux pattern became the de facto standard for state management in the modern front-end development. The good thing about redux is that it’s view agnostic so you can use it with any framework – Vue, React, Angular, etc. Angular has its own redux alternative called ngrx which empowers a declarative approach with RxJS but in general, it follows the same underlying pattern. My recommendation would be to understand how to manage the state of our applications because that’s probably the most complex problem that we’re solving in our day to day development process. Once we have a solid understanding of this, we can easily switch between different frameworks depending on the problems we’re solving, what the rest of the team is using, and the project’s requirements. A very interesting characteristic of learning Angular is that if we get comfortable with the framework we’d be also familiar with TypeScript, RxJS, and techniques such as dependency injection. This may look like an initial overhead but it’s a great long-term investment which pays off really well in large projects. How important is TypeScript to front end development? How important is TypeScript to modern web development? Why? Over the past a couple of years I see a strong increase in the excitement around the language, not only in the Angular world but also in React and Vue. I’m personally using TypeScript for a few projects – a platform that we built with React and an educational application written in Angular. I see a lot of value in using TypeScript. Recently I haven’t started any project with JavaScript – for everything new I’m using TypeScript and I’m trying to migrate, as many of my existing projects as possible.There are a few reasons for this: TypeScript provides great development experience! Especially, combined with VSCode, you can instantly notice when you’ve misspelled a property, method, you’re trying to access a property of a nullable value, etc. It gives you a sense of security that your program is correct to given extent. Of course, TypeScript cannot save us from logical mistakes but if we use its type system wisely, we can get great benefits. You might be curious what benefits? Well, TypeScript can help us reduce the number of bugs in our programs. In the study “To Type or Not to Type: Quantifying Detectable Bugs in JavaScript” the authors shown that the average JavaScript program can benefit with 15% bug reduction if it uses the type system of TypeScript. The study was using TypeScript version 2.0; with the latest features of the language the number of detectable bugs is growing dramatically. Since recently webpack is leveraging TypeScript as well because it helps discover already existing issues in the codebase. Web developers and JavaScript fatigue Do you think we're past web developers experiencing 'JavaScript fatigue'? JavaScript is very dynamic and it moves very quickly. There are a lot of potential issues which could be caused by a variety of reasons. With semantic versioning and powerful type systems (such as the type system of TypeScript), we’re walking in the right direction but we definitely have a long way to go until the ecosystem matures. Web development over the next 12 months: WebAssembly and machine learning What do you think will be the most important thing for developers to learn in the next 12 months? There are a lot of exciting things happening nowadays! Web browsers are getting more and more powerful, exposing hundreds of APIs and opportunities. WebAssembly is moving very quickly and I believe that together with Rust it has a lot of potential in future. On the other hand, Google recently announced TensorFlow.js. This is a library which allows us to use machine learning (ML) in the browser. In the next years, ML is going to take a larger portion of our development process (directly or indirectly) for: Implementing features in our applications Improving development process I’m specifically interested in the second point – improving our development process by using ML. Together with Addy Osmani, Kyle Mathews, and Katie Hempenius, we’ve been working on a toolkit called Guess.js. It aims to provide predictive bundling and pre-fetching based on ML techniques in order to let us develop faster Angular/React/Vue/etc. applications. I’m really excited about what’s coming up in near future! So are we! Thanks for taking the time to speak to us, Minko!

Data-driven testing has become a lot easier thanks to tools like Selenium. That's good news for everyone in software development. It means you can build better software that works for users much more quickly. While the tension between performance and the need to deliver will always remain, it's thanks to efforts of developers to improve testing tools that we are where we are today. We spoke to Carl Cocchiaro about data driven testing and much more. Carl is the author of Selenium Framework Design in Data-Driven Testing. He also talked to us about his book and why it's a useful resource for web developers interested in innovations in software testing today. What is data-driven testing? Packt: Tell us a little bit about data-driven testing. Carl Cocchiaro: Data-Driven Testing has been made very easy with technologies like Selenium and TestNG. Users can annotate test methods and add attributes like Data Providers and Groupings to them, allowing users to iterate through the methods with varying data sets. The key features Packt: What are the 3 key features of Selenium that makes it worth people's attention? CC: Platform independence, its support for multiple programming Languages, and its grid architecture that's really useful for remote testing. Packt: Could someone new to Java start using Selenium? Or are there other frameworks? CC: Selenium WebDriver is an API that can be called in Java to test the elements on a Browser or Mobile page. It is the Gold Standard in test automation, everyone should start out learning it, it's pretty fun to use. What are the main challenges of moving to Selenium? Packt: What are the main challenges someone might face when moving to the framework? CC: Like anything else, the language syntax has to be learned in order to be able to test the applications. Along with that, the TestNG framework coupled with Selenium has lots of features in Data-Driven Testing, and there's a learning curve on both. How to learn Selenium Packt: How is your book a stepping stone for a new Selenium developer? CC: The book details how to design and develop a Selenium Framework from scratch and how to build in Data-Driven Testing using TestNG and a Data Provider class. It's complex from the start but has all the essentials to create a great testing framework. They should get the basics down first before moving towards other types of testing like performance, REST API, and Mobile. Packt: What makes this book a must-have for anyone interested in or working with the tool? CC: Many Selenium guides are geared towards getting users up and running, but this is an advanced guide that teaches all the tricks and techniques I've learned over 30 years. Packt: Can you give people 3 reasons why they should read your book? CC: It's a must-read if designing and developing new frameworks, it circumvents all the mistakes users make in building frameworks, and you will be a Selenium Rockstar at your company after reading it! Learn more about software testing:  Unit Testing and End-To-End Testing Testing RESTful Web Services with Postman

Angular is one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks. Today, it's jostling for position with React and Vue as the leading front-end development framework. But if you're not using it, you're probably wondering why you should switch to Angular at all. What makes Angular such a good web development framework? And what does it give you that the likes of Vue and React don't? To help you decide if you should switch to Angular, we spoke to Minko Gechev, author of the third edition of Switching to Angular. Minko has worked incredibly closely with the Angular project - he was the author of the Angular 2 style guide. That means he's well placed to explain the benefits of Angular and to help you decide if its the right framework for you. Key Takeaways: Angular as against the public opinion has a consistent development lifecycle and is trustworthy for the developers to start their career with. The primary goal of the Angular community is to make the framework lighter and much more efficient. The book Switching to Angular - Third Edition works as a perfect stepping stone for new developers looking to start their journey with Angular. Angular.js and Angular are two different frameworks. Often people incorrectly refer to AngularJS as Angular version 1 which makes developers think that Angular is the next version of AngularJS. Although similar in nature, they should never be considered as predecessor and successor.   How has Angular come to dominate front-end development? What do you think is the primary reason for Angular to have the lion's share of front-end development market? Minko Gechev: There are several important reasons: Angular is a really well-designed framework which provides entire solution for the developers working on the user interface. The framework is developed and maintained by Google. This means that it is very well engineered and a high-quality solution. Angular provides great development experience. Since the beginning Angular was designed to simplify the development process dramatically. The framework provides friendly APIs which makes the process of building complex user interface trivial. Out of the box, Angular has very performant and well tested implementations of two-way data-binding, dependency injection and change detection. Notice that these will not only reduce the boilerplates in the process of application development but also make our code more testable, thanks to dependency injection. This means that the Angular team also thinks about improving the quality characteristics of our applications. On top of that Angular for web development provides a lot of external modules maintained by the Angular team itself, so the same team which works on Angular core, also develops Angular router, Angular forms, Angular material, etc. This allows us to confidently use the entire stack without bothering that the individual pieces of the puzzle may not fit well together. Another important fact is that the framework is developed by Google. This implies a high-quality engineering power for enterprises and individuals who can confidently bet on Angular as a long-term solution for development framework. As it is unlikely from Google to drop support for the framework unexpectedly. Keeping in mind that Angular is used in tonnes of projects inside Google itself, we can rest assured that it’s being tested on a very high-scale constantly. Google would never make a compromise in terms of quality. Development experience is something I am really interested in. The framework is developed with TypeScript. It provides great tooling support implemented in different text editors and IDEs; with precise auto completion suggestions and warning about typing errors; developers’ productivity can increase a lot. On top of that, Angular’s templates are very convenient for static analysis. This helps programmers to build tools which ease the development process even further. A few examples of such tools are codelyzer and the Angular Language Service. Finally, the framework provides predictable release schedule following semantic versioning. We always know what changes to expect in the next release to plan accordingly. What would you like to tell your followers about the latest development in the Angular eco-system? MG: Google is constantly making Angular for web development smaller and faster. Each new release introduces better tooling which drops more unused code from the bundles and makes them smaller. The Angular compiler also brings plenty of optimizations which transform our applications to better  performant versions of themselves. At the same time, we can see very minor incompatibility changes across major releases. The Angular team does an amazing job in making sure that they improve the framework a lot behind the surface but for us, the developers, they leave the APIs unchanged. On the other hand, we have the Angular community which builds on top of the core. There are plenty of community tools improving our day-to-day development process. Also, there are plenty of high quality material which help us to get started with the framework. Should beginners use Angular? Would it be advisable for a newbie JavaScript developer to start using Angular or would you suggest any other framework? MG: I’d definitely encourage beginner JavaScript developers to give Angular a try. They will build good habits by using TypeScript and have less bugs in their code because of the language’s type system. Also, Angular CLI is a great starting point for bootstrapping a new project - no matter whether you’re a beginner or an expert. What makes this book a must have for the would be Angular developers? MG: The book provides a gentle introduction to all the framework’s concepts. In the first chapters, we focus on ideas rather than digging into unfamiliar code. By the time we start writing applications, readers already have a good understanding of the framework foundation so they can just start coding without any struggle. As a former member of the Angular mobile team and long-term contributor, I have revealed implementation details which will help readers get in-depth knowledge about how everything works under the hood. From my teaching experience, I’ve noticed different patterns which help people develop a deeper understanding of new concepts and use them in practice. The main challenges of making the switch to Angular What are the main challenges that anyone would face while shifting to Angular framework? MG: There might be some conceptual overhead in the beginning. The framework encourages us to use best practices which means there might be a lot of new concepts, such as dependency injection, two-way data-binding, observables and Ahead-of-Time compilation. It takes time and practice to digest everything but the good thing is that we can do that incrementally. In the book I provide a step-by-step approach - we start developing fully functional applications with the bare minimum and after that increase our expressiveness and architecture by introducing new ideas and concepts. [box type="info" align="" class="" width=""]Check out this post to learn how to build components using Angular.[/box] Is Angular's dominance fragile? Angular is going through a lot of changes presently, do you feel that these many changes can impact the developer retainability of a particular tool or tech, especially when there are frameworks like React and Vue breathing down the neck of Angular? MG: The incorrect perception about fragility in the Angular’s API is a result of the rewrite of AngularJS. Often people incorrectly refer to AngularJS as Angular version 1 which makes developers think that Angular is the next version of AngularJS. This is incorrect. Angular and AngularJS are completely different frameworks, the only thing in common is that Angular is inspired by AngularJS. This incorrect statement also makes people think that the changes which will happen between Angular version 5 and Angular version 6, for instance, will be as impactful as the changes which happened between Angular version 2 and AngularJS. This is wrong as well. In fact, there were almost no backwards incompatible changes between Angular version 2 and Angular version 5 which means that the API is under strict control and the migration process between major releases is always only related to update of the project’s dependencies’ versions. Regarding the other libraries and frameworks out there such as React and Vue, I see that they are introducing a lot of new ideas as well. There’s competition which is very healthy since it allows the entire ecosystem to constantly evolve. 3 key features of Angular Please share three of the most remarkable features that you feel makes Angular special. Why should people switch to Angular? The dependency injection mechanism of the framework which makes our code testable and enforces better separation of concerns. I’ve had to use other alternative technologies in the past and I can honestly say that this is the feature I missed a lot. The Angular compiler is another remarkable feature. It transforms our application to much more performant versions of itself. Finally, I like the Angular templates. They have plenty of good features and thanks to the great design the Angular compiler is ableto perform a variety of optimizations over our applications. Could another framework replace Angular? Do you in the near future see any framework replacing Angular in popularity and if yes then why? MG: The JavaScript landscape has been very dynamic for the past couple of years. Although Vue is built by independent developers, recently there’s a noticeable focus on frameworks developed and maintained by large companies, such as React and Angular. I think this trend will stay because it’s much safer to bet the future of your product on a framework supported by a big organization. This means it is less likely to have unexpectedly discontinued maintenance and support. With all the qualities that Angular has, I believe that the framework has a very bright future. It has been adopted by a lot of large companies - Microsoft, Capital One, NBA, VMware, Google and many others. [box type="info" align="" class="" width=""]Check out this post on 5 web development tools that will matter in 2018[/box] When Angular made the breaking change to version 2, everyone was divided in their opinion about whether it was the right step, what was your thought? MG: As I mentioned above, Google didn’t introduce breaking changes to version 2 - they created a brand new framework inspired by AngularJS. It’s incorrect to refer to Angular as Angular 2, Angular 4, or Angular 5, etc. It’s just Angular. There’s a new major release of the framework every 6 months. At the moment we’re at version 5; 5 months from now Angular will reach version 6, etc. The differences between Angular version 2 and Angular version 5 are insignificant, there were very minimal backwards incompatible changes. It’s pointless to refer to every new version of Angular by placing a number behind unless we’re describing any specific change which happened across releases. In “Switching to Angular” I’ve focused on the solid foundation of the framework which is unlikely to change in near future. At ng-conf 2017 I introduced a tool which can automatically migrate any Angular application between versions 2 and 4 which simplified the transition process even further. On the other hand, AngularJS (which is incorrectly called Angular 1) is still in use, although Google strongly encourages developers to migrate to Angular. How is this book a stepping stone for a new Angular web developer and what should they try their hands on next? MG: “Switching to Angular” provides a great starting point for any intermediate JavaScript developer who wants to learn Angular. In case the reader has prior experience in AngularJS the transition of their mindset from AngularJS to Angular will be extremely smooth because of the comparison between the two frameworks that is provided. The book also explains in detail what should be the expectations of the readers regarding the future of the framework. If you are interested to get started with Angular javascript framework Switching to Angular - Third Edition is the go-to book to align with.  

Jason De Oliveira works as a CTO for MEGA International, a software company in Paris (France), providing modeling tools for business transformation, enterprise architecture, and enterprise governance, risk, and compliance management. He is an experienced manager and senior solutions architect, with high skills in software architecture and enterprise architecture. He has been awarded him MVP C#/.NET by Microsoft for over 6 years for his numerous contributions to the Microsoft community. In this interview, Jason talks about the newly introduced features of .NET Core 2.0 and how they empower effective cross-platform application development. He also gives us a sneak-peek of his recently released book Learning ASP.NET Core 2.0 Packt: Let's start with a very basic question. What is .NET Core? How is it different from the .NET Framework? Jason De Oliveira: In the last 20 years, Microsoft has focused mainly on Windows and built many technologies around it. You can see that easily when looking at the ASP.NET and the .NET Framework in general. They provide a very good integration and extend the operating system for building great desktop and web applications, but only on the Windows platform. In the last 5 years, we have seen some major changes in the overall strategy and vision of Microsoft due to major changes in the IT market. The cloud-first as well as the mobile-first strategy coupled with the support for other operating systems has lead Microsoft to completely rethink most of the existing frameworks - including the .NET Framework. That is one of the major reasons why the .NET Core framework came into existence. It incorporates a new way of building applications, fully embracing multi-platform development and the latest standards and technologies - and what a great framework it has turned out to be! ASP .Net Core 2.0 was recently announced in August 2017. What are the new features and updates introduced in this release to make the development of web apps easier? The latest version of ASP.NET Core is 2.0, which, provides much better performance than the other versions before it. It has been open-sourced, so developers can understand how it works internally and adapt it easily to specific needs if necessary. Furthermore, the integration between .NET Core and Visual Studio has been improved. Some other important features of this new release are: The Meta-Package which includes everything necessary to develop great web applications has been added to the framework An improved NuGet compatibility has been added. This leads to much better developer productivity and efficiency. Web development can be fun and using .NET Core in conjunction with the latest version of Visual Studio proves it! What benefits does Entity Framework Core 2 offer while building a robust MVC web app? When you are building web applications, you need to store your data somewhere. Today, most of the time the data is stored in relational databases (Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and so on). While there are multiple ways of connecting to a database using ASP.NET Core, we advise using Entity Framework Core 2, because of its simplicity and because it contains all necessary features already built-in. Another big advantage is that it abstracts the database structure from the object-oriented structure within your code (also commonly called ORM). It furthermore supports nearly all databases you can find on the market either directly or via additional providers. When it comes to .NET Core, do you think there is any scope for improvement? What can Microsoft do in the future to improve the suite? To be honest ASP.NET Core 2.0 has achieved a very high level of feature coverage. Nearly everything you can think of is included by default, which is quite remarkable. Nevertheless, Microsoft has already shipped an updated version called ASP.NET Core 2.1 and we can expect that it will further support and evolve the framework. However, an area of improvement could be Artificial Intelligence (AI). As you might know, Microsoft is currently investing very strongly in this area and we think that we might see some features getting included with the next versions of ASP.NET Core. Also in terms of testability of code and especially live unit testing, we hope to see some improvements in the future. Unit tests are important for building high quality application with less bugs, so having a thorough integration of ASP.NET Core with the Visual Studio Testing tools would be a big advantage for any developer. Tell us something about your book. What makes it unique? With this book, you will learn and have fun at the same time. The book is very easy to read, while containing basic and advanced concepts of ASP.NET Core 2.0 web development. It is not only about the development, though. You will also see how to apply agile methodologies and use tools such as Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. The examples in the book are real world examples, which have been added to build a real application at the end. Not just stripped down sample examples, but instead examples that you can adapt to your own application needs quickly. From the start to the end of the book we have applied a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach, meaning that at the end of each chapter you will have evolved the overall sample application a little bit more. This is motivating and interesting and will keep you hooked. You will see how to work in different environments such as on-premises and in the cloud. We explain how to deploy, manage and supervise your ASP.NET Core 2.0 web application in Microsoft Azure, Amazon and Docker, for example. For someone new to web development, what learning path in terms of technologies would you recommend? What is the choice of tools he/she should make to build the best possible web applications? Where does .NET Core 2.0 fit into the picture? There are different types of web developers, who could take potentially different paths. Some will start with the graphical user interface and be more interested in the graphical representation of a web application. They should start with HTML5 and CSS3 and maybe use JavaScript to handle the communication with the server. Then, there are API developers, who are not very interested in graphical representation but more in building efficient API and web services, which allow reducing bandwidth and providing good performance. In our book, we show the readers how to build views and controllers, while using the latest frontend technologies to provide a modern look and feel. We then explain how to use the built-in features of ASP.NET Core 2.0 for building Web APIs and how to connect them via Entity Framework 2 with the database or provide a whole host of other services (such as sending emails, for example).