Rob Gravelle

In a perfect world, websites would make their content available via RSS, Atom feed, or some other easily digested format. Unfortunately, the reality is that most sites are meant to be read directly by a person via a browser. Not to be deterred, many companies harvest content from other sites using a process called Web […]

The Generate a Bar Chart with D3.js tutorial showcased d3.js’s SVG capabilities by producing a stunning bar chart with a relatively small amount of code. Although not readily apparent when working with SVG, D3 shares a lot of similarities with jQuery, and also supports much of the same event handling model. As such, we can […]

Although Node.js may at first glance appear to be just another JavaScript library, in fact, it’s really a server-side runtime environment built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. Running on the server provides a lot of advantages over traditional JavaScript that executes within the confines of the browser. One such advantage is access to the file […]

In the Integrate JSON Web Token Authentication into Single-page Apps article, we were introduced to the JSON Web Token (JWT) open standard (RFC 7519), that defines a compact and self-contained way for securely transmitting information between parties as a JSON object. Having set up a Node.js project in MS Visual Source Code, in today’s tutorial, […]

Of all of TypeScript’s (TS) many notable features, the fat arrow is arguably one of the most powerful, yet it is also the most confusing to newbies to the TS language. For those reasons, it would be a valuable exercise to explore the fat arrow’s role and usage in TS. Fat Arrow Basics The fat […]

Up until recently, in order to perform simple DOM manipulations in response to user interactions, you had two choices: Use plain ‘ole vanilla JavaScript. Use a library like jQuery. Now, there’s a third option: No.js. It’s an extremely lightweight JavaScript library that allows you do DOM manipulations without writing any JavaScript whatsoever. All you’ll need […]

There is a tremendous need for data visualization using charts and graphs on the Web; think finances, statistics, sports scores. Really the list is virtually endless. While the D3.js library is capable of much more, it is a combination of data, based graphics generation, interactions, and DOM manipulation makes it the ideal tool for generating charts. […]

Back in the early days of the Angular framework, when it was still called AngularJS, web developers were introduced to the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) architectural pattern. Understandably, this required a bit of a paradigm shift for many coders. Moreover, there was much confusion about whether Angular was really Model-View Controller (MVC) or Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) . In […]

Let’s face it, raw data is boring. Moreover, it can be a challenge to spot patterns in reams of textual format. Visuals are far easier to interpret. Humans tend to be visual by nature, so putting data in a graphical context makes it much easier to spot trends. There are a few data visualization libraries, […]

There are basically two types of authentication you can use in any web app: Session-based and Token-based. For today’s single-page apps (SPAs), Session-based authentication tends to be overkill. Therefore, Token-based authentication is the de facto standard for SPAs. JSON Web Tokens (JWT) are one of the most widely used in modern SPAs. JWT is an open […]

In the Web Page Scraping with jsoup article I described how to extract data from a web page using the open-source jsoup Java library. As an HTML parser, jsoup only sees the raw page source and is completely unaware of any content that is added to the DOM via JavaScript after the initial page load. […]

Laravel is an open-source PHP framework by Taylor Otwell for creating full-featured web applications. It features a modular packaging system with a dedicated dependency manager, different ways for accessing relational databases, and utilities that aid in application deployment and maintenance, that is oriented toward syntactic sugar. For those of you who are proficient in PHP, […]