API-based solutions are becoming a critical building block of modern digital products. What are they? How can they impact your design process? Finally, how to evaluate them without bothering your software team? The growing amount of data and the need for speed in building products pushed APIs to become the lingua franca of digital teams. To design systems based on API-first systems, make sure you understand the vendors’ offerings. Today, Michał Sędzielewski brings you this hands-on testing guide which is a good starting point in doing so. It will help you explore the API capabilities even before you throw it to your teaching team, saving their energy — and yours as well.
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In the world of APIs, GraphQL has lately overshadowed REST due to its ability to query and retrieve all required data in a single request. Using a component-based API makes most sense when the website is itself built using components, i.e. when the webpage is iteratively composed of components wrapping other components until, at the very top, we obtain a single component that represents the page. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz will describe a different type of API, based around components, which takes a step further the amount of data it can fetch from a single request.
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The scope of possibilities to apply Google Cloud Vision service is practically endless. With Python Library available, it can certainly help you bring out deeper interest in Machine Learning technologies. Google Vision API turned out to be a great tool to get a text from a photo. In this article, Bartosz Biskupski will guide you through the development process with Python in a sample project. If you’re a novice, don’t worry. You will only need a very basic knowledge of this programming language — with no other skills required. Let’s get started!
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The aim of Feature Policy is for us, as web developers, to be able to state our usage of a web platform feature, explicitly to the browser. By doing so, we make an agreement about our use, or non-use of this particular feature. Based on this the browser can act to block certain features, or report back to us that a feature it did not expect to see is being used. In this article, Rachel Andrew will show you how Feature Policy can help protect your site from third parties using APIs that have security and privacy implications, and also from your own team adding outdated APIs or poorly optimized images.
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The Server Timing header provides a discrete and convenient way to communicate backend server performance timings to developer tools in the browser. Adding timing information to your application enables you to monitor back-end and front-end performance all in one place. Over the years developer tools have been improved to help us troubleshoot these sorts of performance issues in the front end of our applications. Browsers now even have performance audits built right in. This can help track down front end issues, but these audits can show up another source of slowness that we can’t fix in the browser.
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Angular is the most powerful JavaScript framework for building highly interactive and dynamic web applications. And material design Is an adaptable system of guidelines, components, and tools that support the best practices of user interface design. In this article, Rachid Sakara is going to build a news application using Angular 6 and Google’s material design in combination, which will help you to make your future applications with Angular look great in web browsers and mobile devices.
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The Beacon API is a lightweight and efficient way to log information from a web page back to a server. It is used for sending small amounts of data to a server without waiting for a response. Think of it like a postcard sent home when on vacation. You put a small amount of data on it, put it in the mailbox, and you don’t expect a response. In this article, Drew McLellan will help you find out how that can be used and what makes it so different from traditional Ajax techniques.
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Is it possible to use digital musical instruments as browser inputs? With the Web MIDI API, the answer is yes! The best part is, it’s fairly quick and easy to implement and even create a really fun project. In this article, Peter Anglea will cover the basics of MIDI and the Web MIDI API to see how simple it can be to create a web app that responds to musical input using JavaScript.
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Whenever we design a web application utilizing real-time data, we need to consider how we are going to deliver our data from the server to the client. The default answer usually is “WebSockets.” But is there a better way? Let’s compare three different methods: Long polling, WebSockets, and Server-Sent Events; to understand their real-world limitations. The answer might surprise you.
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GraphQL’s features are not a revolution, but what makes GraphQL powerful is that the level of polish, integration, and ease-of-use make it more than the sum of its parts. Many of the things GraphQL accomplishes can, with effort and discipline, be achieved using REST or RPC, but GraphQL brings state of the art APIs to the enormous number of projects that may not have the time, resources or tools to do this themselves. In this article, Eric Baer focuses almost entirely on why GraphQL exists and the problems it solves.
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