What is CarPlay? CarPlay is an Apple car integration standard that allows you to display content from your iPhone onto your compatible car head unit and control your phone. Common uses for this include casting music from services such as Spotify or Apple Music or for trip navigation using a map application.
The recent release of TypeScript 4.0 offers a smorgasbord of improvements including improvements to coding editor experience, build scenarios and support for variadic tuple types. Let’s take a closer look at some of these improvements a developer can make use of in this latest release. Support for Variadic Tuple Types TypeScript 4.
Originally published October 2018. Updated September 2020. This article describes the features and functionality of TypeScript 4.0. One of the most interesting languages for large-scale application development is Microsoft’s TypeScript. TypeScript is unique in that it is a superset of JavaScript, but with optional types, interfaces, generics, and more.
This cheat sheet is an adjunct to our Definitive TypeScript Guide. Originally published November 2018. Updated September 2020 for TypeScript 4.0.
Originally published November 2018. Updated September 2020. This article describes the features and functionality of TypeScript 4.0. While TypeScript is very simple to understand when performing basic tasks, having a deeper understanding of how its type system works is critical to unlocking advanced language functionality.
TypeScript has become a mainstay of modern web development libraries. Consuming functions and widgets written by a third party can be error-prone without some type of guidance. Introducing static typing to the interfaces doesn’t just reduce misuse, it has added benefits including intelligent code completion.
This is part 2 of the Disciplined Engineering series. It focuses on improving the confidence of the code produced by your team. If you haven’t already, we recommend reading Part 1: Building an Engineering Process as a prerequisite for these practices. You can also check out Part 3: Refining Your Engineering Process.
The recent TypeScript 3.9 release primarily focuses on performance and stability, but it does include some language updates that are worth a closer look. Expansion of uncalled function checks Continuing its quest to save you from yourself, TypeScript 3.9 expands on the uncalled function checks that were introduced in version 3.7.
SitePen is a huge advocate for TypeScript and the benefits of having well typed code. TypeScript is especially powerful when used by medium and large teams that want to find ways to increase their overall confidence in their code.
What is React Native React Native is a JavaScript framework for writing hybrid native mobile applications for both iOS and Android platforms.
In many ways TypeScript is more like a powerful linting and documentation tool to author better JavaScript, rather than a separate programming language. One significant benefit of TypeScript is its deliberate support for some of the latest ECMAScript language features.
The ubiquity of JavaScript is undeniable; it’s the universal language of the web — a position that no other languages hold. JavaScript is flexible, able to adapt and grow as the web grows.
Augmented Reality (AR) brings digital information or media and interweaves it with our experience of the real-world. In recent years Augmented Reality has become apparent in the consumer space in two major formats: head mounted displays such as the Microsoft HoloLens and the Magic Leap along with more widely available experiences on mobile devices.
In a previous post we looked at how to compile the popular programming language Go to WebAssembly. WebAssembly is a new programming language which provides a compact binary format for the web. In this post we’ll explore another WebAssembly target language called AssemblyScript.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash The Ecma TC39 committee, which standardizes the JavaScript language (officially known as ECMAScript), has been discussing a decorators proposal for several years.
SitePen participates in a number of conferences around the world presenting new technology and ideas to engineers and designers. Recently Dylan Schiemann and Tom Dye spoke at the HalfStack Conference in London and Paul Shannon spoke at Phoenix TypeScript meetup.
WebAssembly has grown in popularity due to its ability to improve application performance and support transpilation of source code in other languages into something that may get leveraged in a web browser.
The 2018 edition of the Node+JS Interactive conference featured nearly 1,000 JavaScript and Node.js enthusiasts at the first combined event organized by the Node.js Foundation and JS Foundation. The event included nearly 100 sessions, panels, and community events designed to help grow and foster the JavaScript ecosystem.
At this month’s FullStack London 2018, our CEO, Dylan Schiemann, presented the talk “Choosing a Framework”, based on our Choosing a Framework blog series. Given our long history in web development, we’ve seen JavaScript evolve from an obscure simplistic scripting language to the language of the internet.
Resize Observer allows developers to receive notifications when the size of an element’s content rectangle changes. This helps manage a variety of application layout scenarios including responsive application layout, flexible layouts such as split panes, or dynamic changes in content within an element in a page.
Nest is a scalable framework for building server-side applications. It is authored in TypeScript and relies on the Express framework. It leans heavily on modern language features such as async/await and decorators to reduce cruft and place the focus cleanly on route-handling business logic.
At the recent TSConf, SitePen engineer Sarah Higley delivered a talk titled Escape the Office: Designing Interfaces for Other Developers. The moment you step into any large project or open source venture you must accept that code you write gets used in ways you did not originally intend.
WebAssembly is an emerging standard for a low-level assembly-like language in a compact binary format that runs with near-native performance, and is available as a compilation target for a variety of languages. We’ve heard significant misunderstanding around WebAssembly and what it means for the web and JavaScript.
In case you missed it, SitePen was the presenting sponsor of the inaugural TSConf which took place in Seattle on March 12, 2018! The Backstory In 2017, we met the TypeScript team in person after years of being avid members and contributors to the TypeScript project.
Intern Recorder is a Chrome extension that can kickstart the process of creating functional tests for Intern. It was initially released in 2015 users of Intern authored test suites as AMD modules.
Intern is a popular JavaScript testing framework with an extensive feature set. While Intern has traditionally been focused on testing applications written in standard JavaScript, it has also had great support for TypeScript. With version 4, Intern has been completely rewritten in TypeScript, allowing it to provide a more seamless testing experience for TypeScript projects.
TypeScript 2.6 was released on the 31st of October. It is a moderately sized release like many of the other of the more rapid releases from the TypeScript team over the past year. TypeScript 2.6 include a few key and interesting features.
Whenever you start working with a new programming language or framework, you need to learn a new collection of error messages and how to resolve them. Sometimes those messages are obvious, and others only become obvious as you gain experience with the new technology.
It is like the old proverb, “It takes a village to raise a web framework.
For a web framework to be effective, it should offer you more than just functionality. It doesn’t matter how much hard work you put into your application if it breaks when people use it. Beyond testing, let’s explore how frameworks can help us build better code before we test it.
Intern is an incredibly powerful and feature-rich approach to all types of JavaScript and TypeScript testing. Intern 4 is a major update refactored in TypeScript and with much improved support for modern language features and support for ESM as well as bundlers like webpack.
Over the past year we’ve been heads-down working hard on Dojo 2 and its component architecture. The ability to change default component behavior is essential to a widget library, and several tactics exist for doing so.
Unless you have a time machine or a TARDIS, it’s pretty rare to have solid documentation in place before an open source project is released! While we’re getting close to a beta release with the Intern 4 and while we still have a fair amount of documentation and refinements to complete, a number of people
Test early, test often, and test some more. Why put our heart and soul into our web applications only to be let down because we are not completely testing them. Let’s explore how the different web frameworks approach testing.
Previously on Web Frameworks, we looked at how various frameworks deal with the concept of applications. Akin to listening to the whole album, we got a sense of how the frameworks pull it all together.
Applications built with web technologies, something that was a curiosity a few short years ago, have emerged onto the scene as a must have for most organizations. Transcending websites and providing users with a more open and unbounded experience, web applications are everywhere.
We have previously discussed the look and feel of web frameworks. While we often become interested in a framework based on the stylishness of the widgets and applications it can create, this may lead to a similar approach to how we have historically selected music.
The TypeScript 2.4 release might be a minor update in terms of not requiring substantial changes within our open source work and customer projects, but it provides some major benefits that we are already leveraging throughout the Dojo 2 codebase.
While instruments such as guitar and drums are part of a band, how they are used by the musicians define the style of the band’s music. Similarly, the elements of an application user interface connected together define the user experience.
Since we released Intern in 2013, the state of JavaScript testing has changed substantially. The JavaScript world was a very different place. Node.js was at version 0.8, and core modules like http were still being heavily developed! Popular tools like webpack, React, and TypeScript were still in the early stages of development.
Whether it is Top 40 or classical or R&B, artists and music have a recognizable look and feel. When looking at frameworks, some simply provide us with a bag of instruments, while others provide us with chord progressions and album covers we can customize.
…we would all be using justin-bieber.js. We as an organization have been working with JavaScript since 2000. We have seen frameworks rise and fall, including being responsible for some of them. We have seen trends come and go. We have seen browser dominance ebb and flow. We have seen winners and losers.
For a concise read on why the enterprise should care about using TypeScript in its applications, look no further than Remo Jansen of the Aon Centre for Innovation and Analytics’ presentation on the 6 reasons you should be using TypeScript.
TypeScript 2.3 is the latest version in the quarterly release cycle from the TypeScript team. This release contains several useful additions to TypeScript which we have already started to leverage within some of our current projects.
dojox/gfx is Dojo 1.x’s vector graphics library, with support for SVG, Canvas, and other legacy rendering environments through a drawing API based on the semantics of SVG. This API also provides the foundation for dojox/charting. Often the biggest challenge in working with vector graphics is the large number of possible configuration settings and permutations.
Over the past several months, the SitePen team has been hard at work on Dojo 2 along with the tools and infrastructure to support it. Part of that infrastructure, and one of the major priorities for Dojo 2, is to have top notch developer documentation, complete with examples, tutorials, and API documentation.
In our recent post about the key features in ES2017, I was reminded just how much the standards process has changed in the past 15 years. As someone who tried to get involved early to improve standards, the process was broken and I was quickly discouraged.
As many of you know, Dojo 2 is being built on TypeScript. Many of us involved in Dojo 2 believe that TypeScript brings several advantages to developing with web technologies these days.
As we near the finalization of the proposal, it’s looking like ES8 is going to deliver much more than the simple updates of its ES7 predecessor! We wanted to take a few moments to highlight our 5 favorite things about the upcoming 2017 release.
Functional programming and reactive programming principles are not new to JavaScript, but their adoption has recently become widespread across most modern frameworks and toolkits.
The TypeScript team recently announced the TypeScript 2.2 release candidate which will contain key improvements to the TypeScript language. Most notably, are the introduction of the object type and improved support for mixins and composable classes.
The motivation for Intern 4 is to make it easier to author tests with ES6+ features within tests, with or without transpilation. Want to skim? Here’s the Intern Roadmap which lists our high level status for each Intern release going forward.
As the new year starts to unfold, it’s time to take a quick look at the things our team at SitePen resolves to do this year.
Thanks to a generous Mozilla Open Source Support program award, Intern has expanded its testing ecosystem to include new and robust sets of tools. Engineers can now easily write tests to benchmark sections of code, test for accessibility (a11y) support, and test for visual differences.
The TypeScript team has just announced the release of TypeScript 2.1 which contains several long-awaited features (pun intended) for Dojo 2.
Today we’re pleased to announce the release of Intern 3.4. This release brings usability enhancements and bugfixes, including a new benchmarking mode! We’ve outlined some of the features below, but as always, visit the release notes for more details. A number of contributors made this release possible.
This October, we delivered meetup talks on WebVR in London and Phoenix on the same day to share our early efforts in exploring WebVR with TypeScript, Dojo 2, Intern, and A-Frame.
One of the main challenges with creating modern JavaScript web applications is the relatively incomplete approach to ES modules. As an interim solution until all necessary use cases are solved, many developers create source code with ESM, and then transpile to either AMD, CJS, or UMD for easy usage within today’s browsers.
SitePen Support is a service used by companies to improve the productivity and efficiency of their enterprise development teams. Our customers often ask questions about best practices when using various development tools for modern JavaScript and TypeScript development. Recently, we were asked to better explain some of the asynchronous syntax used by Intern.
Over the past few years, TypeScript has iterated and greatly improved developer ergonomics.
Recently on GitHub, someone accused Dojo 2 of being vapourware. This opinion came from a position of misinformation. I was glad the individual then engaged with the Dojo 2 project to understand where we are today. We are making swift progress and a beta is on the horizon.
FullStack is a large London JavaScript conference hosted at the Skills Matter CodeNode. The conference brings together an impressive line-up of speakers and workshops covering five tracks over three full days of festivities. We were invited to speak at FullStack, and also enjoyed many of the other sessions and met many great engineers.
In this installment of our series on building web applications, we look at the SitePen approach to solving challenges in web application development. We employ all of the solutions described in part 2 of the blog series. Additionally, we have some overarching principles we apply to our work.
While there are many challenges today with building web applications, there are also many options to address the issues we face with technology, process, and people, allowing us to reap the benefits of the web as an application platform.
Web applications provide many benefits. Most organizations seek to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes through the use of software. The benefits of web applications include: Simple distribution model for end users (e.g. no installation required) Instant propagation of changes Unified code base to support many platforms (desktop, tablet, mobile, etc.
Peter Higgins, former project lead for Dojo, gave an excellent talk at JSConf in 2013 titled “Dojo Already Did That” (which reflected a humorous meme started at the first JSConf). It was highly informative about how Dojo had already solved problems that the JavaScript community were solving again in 2013.
Symbols are a new, unique, primitive type introduced in ECMAScript 6 (ES6). They were added to the language in order to solve the problem of extending the functionality of Object while maintaining backwards-compatibility with code written in earlier versions of JavaScript.
I attended the Microsoft Edge Web Summit in San Francisco. I will be honest, outside of meeting a few people, I wasn’t expecting much. Instead, I found myself face-to-face with the “new” Microsoft.
Picture this: 100+ developers and their phones and laptops making crashing noises playing a live-created clone of Flappy Bird. Now picture the same devices working together to create a live MIDI concert, followed by a challenging and fun JavaScript pub quiz.
One of the main benefits of working in TypeScript is that it lets developers use modern standards within their source code today. Tools like destructuring, rest and spread operations, and classes make it easier to define structures and work with data. TypeScript also provides support for ES.
I had the pleasure of attending Connect-JS in Atlanta this past weekend and had a great time speaking, attending talks and meeting some very talented people. Connect-JS totes itself as being a low-cost, community conference that brings in recognized experts from around the world.
The V8 team (the JavaScript engine that powers Chrome, Opera, Node.js, MongoDB, etc…) are moving forward with an experiment in defining a stronger version of JavaScript that ensures that code being run is behaving well, and introducing run-time typing based on TypeScript’s typings.
Transpiling or compiling code has become a necessity today for JavaScript-based web development. Whether you are using TypeScript, Babel, Dart, Traceur, or CoffeeScript to provide additional language features, or trying to optimise your code with the likes of UglifyJS, r.
SitePen is a huge supporter of TypeScript. It allows our developers to write using modern standards support for ES6 and some ES7 features while still targeting ES5 browsers. It also includes a type system that adds to our code’s integrity and makes it easier to write good software.
Over the past several years, JavaScript has grown to be relevant not only for rich browser applications, but also for server and console applications. Many types of JavaScript libraries can be useful on both ends of this spectrum.
At the end of 2014, we looked ahead to determine where to focus SitePen’s open source efforts in the coming year.
This post has been updated to cover Intern 3.4 and TypeScript 2.3. Read our Intern 4 and TypeScript testing article for more recent information. Intern is a popular JavaScript testing framework, because of its extensive, modular feature set.
This article describes the features and functionality of TypeScript 2.5. While TypeScript is very simple to understand when performing basic tasks, having a deeper understanding of how its type system works is critical to unlocking advanced language functionality.