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Over the last few years, several web design trends have exploded in popularity and different frameworks and libraries have emerged to support them. It’s been close to a decade since the term ‘responsive’ became mainstream and changed our way of thinking about the structure of our applications across devices. Since that time other design philosophies have followed as we sought ways to improve the user experience across a diverse range of platforms. At the same time tools and techniques have continued to improve to arm designers with the right frameworks, libraries and approaches to deliver the best user experiences possible. In this article I will cover some of the more popular design approaches and libraries that can be used to implement them. I’ll conclude with a quick list of several wireframing tools that can also be used in design. I recommend checking out each of these resources via the links provided below. ...

Visual Composer is a drag-and-drop WordPress website builder that makes it easy for anyone to create beautiful layouts without touching any code. It’s perfect for people who want to design their own websites and don’t have the time, knowledge, or patience to learn how to use complicated website building tools. You can customize your site with Visual Composer in a few clicks or by choosing from one of its prebuilt templates. ...

TypeScript can be a confusing term for anyone new to JavaScript development. The first impression of TypeScript for beginners is that it is a programming language, more or less, similar to JavaScript. Even professionals with enough coding experience often fail to define TypeScript. So how can we put the answer to this question - What is TypeScript? TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript. It has optional static typing, classes, and interfaces. TypeScript is not a separate programming language, what makes it different from JavaScript lies in part of its name - Type. Every programming language has data types, In JavaScript these include the commonly used number, string, boolean, etc. To understand TypeScript, we first need to understand how JavaScript behaves with its data types. ...

AppWorks provides a handy feature for modeling business objects through the use of entities. Objects could take the form of any aspect of a business application you are building. For example, if you needed to write an application that would be used as part of a school’s administration system you may include entities that represented objects such as teachers, students, courses, lessons, and so on. AppWorks provides a nice interface for managing these different types of entities and even lets you build relationships. The term entity modeling is not new to this platform, the concept behind this has been around for a long time, but it has traditionally been the responsibility of database engineers or software developers to define. The low-code platform AppWorks provides now enables business analysts to define these entities and relationships, without the need to have a software engineering background. ...

In an ever more global and connected world, knowing a foreign language is becoming a more valuable and necessary skill. Fortunately, the modern age has added a new dimension to language learning and today’s learner has more tools at his disposal than ever before, all thanks to the Internet. But at the end of the day, it’s still the same old problem that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. Learning a language still takes persistence and the willingness to learn, and unfortunately there is no tool yet invented to combat that, and I don’t think there ever will be, but the problem in successful language learning may lie in us purposefully choosing the most difficult path. ...

OpenText AppWorks is an application development platform that enables rapid creation of software designed to meet business problems. It’s low-code capabilities means that we can involve requirements specialists and business analysts in the development process while working along-side developers implementing more advanced services integrations and business processes. A few months ago I wrote a couple of articles outlining how to install AppWorks locally using Docker as well as setting up a version control system for your applications using SVN. If you are interested in setting up AppWorks as a development environment, I highly recommend checking these out. ...

The term “asynchronous” is often associated with JavaScript, which can be a confusing concept, especially for beginners. This can become even more confusing because JavaScript is a synchronous language with asynchronous capabilities. In order to understand asynchronous development in general, we need to start with the difference between synchronous and asynchronous programming. In simple terms, executing one task or item at a time is often referred to as synchronous, while executing multiple tasks (or threads) at a time is referred to as asynchronous. ...

A function is an organized block of code that is created for a specific task. It can accept and return values. The main purpose of using functions is for code reusability and organization. In JavaScript, functions can be considered ‘higher-order’. To better understand this term, we need to look at some basic concepts related to JavaScript functions. Functions in JavaScript Take a look at the following code snippet: function demo(){ console.log("This is a demo function") } demo() This is a very basic example of a JavaScript function. The name of the function is “demo” and its prints “This is a demo function!” in the console. We we can do a lot more with this function, including assigning it to a variable, or passing it to another function as a parameter. This is possible because JavaScript is a functional programming language. ...

If you have ever come across Node.js, then you may have heard the word “Express.js”. Express is also a part of popular full-stack web development stacks - MEAN and MERN. M, A/R, and N, meaning MongoDB, Angular/React, and Node.js, respectively are very popular in the web development community, while E, i.e. Express.js is unpopular. Many developers who work with MEAN or MERN stack don’t even know what is the exact meaning of express. So in this article, we will discuss express.js with examples. ...

The word “Node.js” is very popular today in the web development community. Everyone is talking about Node.js. The IT giants, startups, everyone wants Node.js developers. But what is Node.js and why it is so popular? Simply put, Node.js is nothing but JavaScript outside the browser. Yes, you read it right. Node.js is JavaScript that runs outside the browser. Not much difference, right? But no doubt, Node.js is one of the most popular “language” today. So in this article, we will discuss everything about Node.js. Before we jump to node.js, let’s talk about JavaScript first. ...