Building a stellar application that users will love consists of many different decisions, from UI design and color palettes to functionality and feature sets. Writing code that works is a creative process, but it’s only one part of the entire development process. Your app also needs to be secure — not just for the sake of your users, but also for the integrity of your business. Typical security measures when designing your software architecture include:

• Safe and well-tested authentication and authorization schemes
• The ability to control network traffic through firewalls and port monitoring
• Service and resource isolation, so that one…

A common architectural design pattern these days is to break up an application monolith into smaller microservices. Each microservice is then responsible for a specific aspect or feature of your app. For example, one microservice might be responsible for serving external API requests, while another might handle data fetching for your frontend.

Designing a robust and fail-safe infrastructure in this way can be challenging. Monitoring the operations of all these microservices together can be even harder.

It’s best not to simply rely on your application logs for an understanding of your systems’ successes and errors. Setting up proper monitoring will…

Earlier this year, a post came out on the Salesforce Developers Blog, entitled “How to Build Progressive Web Apps with Offline Support using Lightning Web Components.” During the post’s discussion about using Lightning Web Components (LWC) to build progressive web apps, it mentioned push notifications. My interest was piqued. How simple would it be to use LWC to build an app for push notifications? It turns out — really simple.

A Quick Review: What Is a Progressive Web App (PWA)?

While a PWA can be used in a web browser like any standard web application, the PWA’s power comes from users being able to “install” the PWA to their desktop…

Background Jobs in Heroku with Azure Service Bus

Web applications are optimized for throughput and latency to service a high number of HTTP requests as quickly as possible. For improved performance, web applications defer the CPU intensive, IO intensive, time-intensive, and scheduled processing workloads to background jobs that run independently of the user interface. These background jobs must function without intervention from the user interface and should not block a synchronous user and system interaction. Offloading slow and compute or memory-intensive activity to background jobs improves web applications’ performance and throughput.

For example, consider an eCommerce web application that captures a customer’s orders and triggers the background jobs…

Getting Familiar with New Web Standards

You might already know that frontend development requires just three technologies upon which the entire web is built: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In the not-too-distant past, the feature set of these standards lagged behind the functional wishes of developers and designers. They couldn’t build the web sites they wanted to build with the tools they were given. To work around this, several independent teams each devised their own frameworks to supplement what was officially supported by browsers.

In one sense, these frameworks worked well. They introduced new UI patterns and dynamic websites at a time when desktop and mobile browsers…

Salesforce Modern App Development — Part 1

As someone who became a Salesforce developer “by accident” 10 years ago and parlayed that into a career and business, I’m fully aware of the dividends that investing in continuous learning and brushing up on the latest in my industry can yield. …

When I first heard about RedwoodJS, I thought it was just another front-end JavaScript framework. I wondered whether it would it be like React or more like Angular. As it turned out, I didn’t have a clue what RedwoodJS was, but now I can’t wait to build more projects using it.

What is RedwoodJS?

RedwoodJS is a full-stack, serverless JavaScript framework. It is the JavaScript answer to Rails or Django. It uses the Jamstack approach to build an application with both front-end and back-end code. It also uses popular frameworks and libraries to accomplish this:

• React
• GraphQL
• Prisma

Using RedwoodJS allows you to…

Introduction

As a full-stack developer who often takes on DevOps and infrastructure responsibilities, the following happens all too frequently.

Problem: I need to set up a backend server for my app!

Solution: Google it!

Google result #1:

• How to set up <tech 1>, <tech 2>, and <tech 3> in just five minutes, for free!
• <skip the prereqs because who needs those, follow the instructions, hit an error>

Hmm, let’s try that again…

• <install all the prereqs, follow the instructions, hit another error>

Okay, maybe it’s just this article. Let’s try a different one.

Google result #2:

• Make your own <tech 2>…