NodeJS gives Krasimir Tsonev ability to write back-end code in one of his favorite languages: JavaScript. It's the perfect technology for building real time applications. In this tutorial, he'll show you how to build a web chat application, using ExpressJS and Socket.io.

Frameworks provide a tool for rapid application development, but often accrue technical debt as rapidly as they allow you to create functionality. Technical debt is created when maintainability isn't a purposeful focus of the developer. Future changes and debugging become costly, due to a lack of unit testing and structure. Here's how to begin structuring your code to achieve testability and maintainability – and save you time.

In his previous article, Pavan Podila covered some of HTTP’s basics, such as the URL scheme, status codes and request/response headers. With that as our foundation, we will look at the finer aspects of HTTP, like connection handling, authentication and HTTP caching. These topics are fairly extensive, but we’ll cover the most important bits.

In his previous tutorial, Rey Bango touched on how to use Ember.Object to define your models and work with datasets. In this section, we’ll look more closely at how Ember uses the Handlebars templating framework to define your app's user interface. Most server-side developers are used to using templates to define markup that will be dynamically filled on the fly. If you've ever used ASP.NET, ColdFusion, PHP or Rails then it's pretty much assured you know what he's talking about.

The pseudo-classes are used to target elements without having to add extra classes, attributes or ID; that is why it is called in that way, pseudo-class. Throughout our previous posts, we have covered a few new CSS3 pseudo-classes, including :not, :before and :after, :first-of-type and we also use pseudo-classes in some of our tutorials. And in this post we are going to walk through the other new CSS3 pseudo-classes that have not been covered yet. Let’s take a look.

Newcomers to NodeJS typically find its API difficult to grasp. Luckily, many developers have created frameworks that make it easier to work with Node. Connect is one such framework. It sits on top of Node’s API and draws the line between comfort and control. Think of Connect as a stack of middleware. With every request, Connect filters through the layers of middleware, each having the opportunity to process the HTTP request. When T.J. Holowaychuk announced Connect, he said there were two types of middleware. The first is a filter.

Like any overzealous teenager aspiring to be a Web designer back in 1999, Dan Rose found himself in an “Electronic Design” class, behind the wheel of one of those old-school aqua iMacs. If you found yourself in a similar situation, chances are you were given Adobe Photoshop as your vehicle for designing the Web. For him, it was version 6.0. No matter which version you had, undoubtedly you know someone who can “trump” you by having adopted an earlier version. Designers take much pride in this, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Reflection is generally defined as a program’s ability to inspect itself and modify its logic at execution time. In less technical terms, reflection is asking an object to tell you about its properties and methods, and altering those members (even private ones). In this lesson, we’ll dig into how this is accomplished, and when it might prove useful.

Rey Bango hopes that you’re starting to see that Ember.js is a powerful, yet opinionated, framework. We’ve only scratched its surface; there’s more to learn before we can build something truly useful! We’ll continue using the Ember Starter Kit. In this portion of the series, we’ll review accessing and managing data within Ember.

HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It’s a stateless, application-layer protocol for communicating between distributed systems, and is the foundation of the modern web. As a web developer, we all must have a strong understanding of this protocol. Let’s review this powerful protocol through the lens of a web developer.

The concept of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is fairly new to PHP. There’s currently no official AOP support in PHP, but there are some extensions and libraries which implement this feature. In this lesson, Patkos Csaba will use the Go! PHP library to teach you AOP in PHP, and review when it can be helpful.

Generated content was first introduced in the CSS2 specification. For several years, the feature was used by relatively few Web authors due to inconsistent browser support. With the release of Internet Explorer 8 in 2009, generated content was rediscovered, and many interesting implementations were adopted for the first time. In this article, Gabriele Romanato will discuss some possible uses of generated content.

n many ways, responsive Web design deserves a big share of the honor for making the Web more usable on non-desktop devices. This trend of letting the browser determine more about how a Web page should be displayed makes sense, especially now that mobile browsers are slightly more trustworthy than in the old days of mobile.

There are several ways to make navigation responsive, and usually the solution we need is quite straightforward. But despite the apparent simplicity, there are many underlying factors which, when thought through and implemented properly, can make a simple solution even better without adding more complexity to the user interface.

In his introductory article, Rey Bango went over the basics of the Ember.js framework, and the foundational concepts for building an Ember application. In this follow-up article, we’ll dive deeper into specific areas of the framework to understand how many of the features work together to abstract the complexities of single-page application development.

With its structured approach to organizing assets, Adobe Fireworks can be a pleasure for designing and prototyping. But demonstrating your designs on a wide range of devices can be time-consuming and could even require some degree of coding. The Create Demo extension addresses some of these issues. It automatically converts your Fireworks documents into portable presentations, which can then be easily presented in any browser — desktop or mobile.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create the Tabber widget, which is very useful for when multiple widgets need to fit in a sidebar. It saves space and streamlines the appearance and functionality of your WordPress-powered website. In the past, there were different methods of doing this, most of which were theme-dependent. As you’ll see in this tutorial, creating a tabbed widget that works on its own and with any theme is easily accomplished.

In this article we covered all the important topics regarding the Sliding PayPal Shopping Cart Dreamweaver extensions. Here, you will find everything from basic usage and how to implement it on your website, to combining it with other DMXzone extensions and working with behaviors. For your convenience, the tutorials are also available in video format.

With the release of Windows 8, Microsoft introduced Windows Store applications, which can be authored using traditional web languages that leverage the underlying engines powering Internet Explorer 10. This means that jQuery 2.0, engineered to work best in modern browsers, is right at home in a Windows Store application!

A recent study (PDF) found that more than 80% of people are disappointed with the experience of browsing Web on mobile devices and would use their smartphones more if the browsing experience improved. This isn’t surprising when 64% of smartphone users expect websites to load in 4 seconds or less, while the average website takes more than twice that amount, at 9 seconds. This article explains techniques you can use to make your websites faster on mobile devices.

As UI designers, we’re always interested in learning, reading user research, understanding best practices and keeping up to date on all the latest approaches and tactics for building websites and applications. One of the most exciting concepts we’ve started to apply to our thinking is the mobile-first approach, famously pioneered by designer Luke Wroblewski on his blog and then in his subsequent book. Generally, this approach provides a healthy way to gain focus, cut the fat and get to the heart of what’s important — for both content and interaction.

Back in 2009, Sergey Chikuyonok wrote an article to present a new way of writing HTML and CSS code. This revolutionary plugin, called Zen Coding, has helped many developers through the years and has now reached a new level. Emmet, previously known as Zen Coding, is the most productive and time-saving text-editor plugin you will ever see. By instantly expanding simple abbreviations into complex code snippets, Emmet can turn you into a more productive developer.

Lately, there has been a considerable amount of buzz around a new web platform, called Meteor.  Meteor is a JavaScript framework, built around many small packages – some of which you may already be using, like MongoDB or jQuery. But don’t think of Meteor as a package manager, because it is far more powerful than that! Meteor customized these packages into what they refer to as “smart packages” that communicate seamlessly with one another. In this article, Gabriel Manricks will explain what it is, and why you should consider it for your future applications!

Meteor is far more than a quick prototyping tool, but it sure is great for prototyping. In this tutorial, Tom Coleman will walk us through the process of turning a simple HTML wireframe into a functional application in a surprisingly simple number of steps. We’ll be creating a simple wireframe of a chatroom application. The process he's trying to demonstrate is starting with a pure HTML/CSS wireframe, done in Meteor for convenience, which can then very easily be transformed into a real application, thanks to the ease of Meteor development.

There are 3,997 different Android devices. Your navigation should work with all of them. C-Swipe can help: It is an alternative navigation pattern for tablets and mobile devices that is novel, ergonomic and localized. This article provides a detailed walk-through of the design and code and provides a downloadable mini-app so that you can try out C-Swipe to see whether it’s right for your app.

This post should be titled “Getting Ahead of Yourself.” “…By a Few Years,” actually. Here’s the deal: at the time Radu Chelariu is writing this, early 2013, there’s no way to accurately design for the Web using physical units, nor will there be for a very long time. But there is a way to design while knowing the physical characteristics of the device — or, at least, there will be in the very near future.

Recently Siobhan McKeown shared some advice from the WordPress community to beginners. But what if starting out is already a dim memory? What if you’re already so immersed in the world of WordPress that you dream of Trac and you bore your partner with talk of your latest achievement with custom post types? Here are some tips from WordPress pros from across the community. Many of the tips cover development, but there’s also advice on business, running your website and, of course, getting involved with the community.

In this article you will find all the needed information about the Pure PHP Upload 3 Dreamweaver extension. It includes some basic and advanced tutorials as well as video presentations on how to use the extension with update and insert record, how to upload large files and many more. If you have any questions regarding this tool, please use the extension forums or find us on the Live support during business hours.

Twitter’s Bootstrap has taken off like a rocket since its release a year ago. The popular CSS framework supplies a responsive grid system, pre-styled components and JavaScript plugins to a parade of websites. One of Bootstrap’s appeals is that it just works. It’s a significant time-saver when starting a website, so much so that major organizations such as NBC, NASA and the White House are adopting it. And it empowers even the non-designers to turn out something decent.

Web apps can be split into two major components: a front-end that displays and collects information, and a back-end for storing the information. In this article, Lalith Polepeddi will demonstrate what a relational database is, and how to properly design your database to store your app’s information.