All posts by Emmett Walsh

Online Shopping

Online shopping could become more expensive after Supreme Court ruling

eCommerce, Front-end, Tech News, , , ,

Aside from the obvious convenience and choice that e-commerce has always offered, an often overlooked factor in its success in the US over the years has been the fact that sales tax did not have to be collected by a business if they didn’t have a physical presence in the state that they are selling within.

In effect this has led to the majority of online sales being tax-free – great for consumers and great for companies as they did not have to navigate state and local tax codes. Continue reading →

‘Node style’ Reactive Java apps with Spring WebFlux

App Development, Back-end, Java, MongoDB, Node.js, UX, , , , , ,

Node.js logoMy last few assignments had taken me away from my relative safety of the JVM and into the topsy turvy world of Node.js for the first time.

It certainly took me a while to get used to things – wrapping my head around the whole non-blocking nature of the Node runtime and how it uses a single thread to process requests – and how important it was that I definitely do not block that thread! Continue reading →

REST-less yet ? Try GraphQL

Agile, Angular.js, App Development, Back-end, JavaScript, Node.js, React.js, ,

Lets face it, REST can can have its downsides e.g :

  • dealing with a whole bunch of endpoints in a typical application
  • performing multiple roundtrips to the server for multiple resources in order to get data for a single page of the UI
  • getting the request parameters right
  • dealing with api versions – coupling between the client and the responses from the server
  • over-fetching of information that is not needed

Continue reading →

Simple AWS Lambda and API Gateway with Claudia.js

Agile, Amazon Web Services, Back-end, Cloud Computing, HeartyHosting, Node.js, Uncategorized, , ,

For any of you Node.js folks out there already using serverless frameworks like ‘The Serverless Framework‘ , you’ll definitely want to checkout the really cool Claudia.js framework…

Claudia makes it easy to deploy Node.js projects to AWS Lambda and API Gateway. It automates all the error-prone deployment and configuration tasks, and sets everything up the way JavaScript developers expect out of the box. Continue reading →

API.AI rebrands to Dialogflow

App Development, Artificial Intelligence, Tech News

A couple of months ago we reported on Google’s acquisition of our favorite natural language processing (NLP) platform – API.AI.

Well since then it seems that API.AI have gone from strength to strength in so many new areas, …so much so in fact that they have decided to rebrand in order to better describe their current more diverse platform which includes an analytics tools and 33 prebuilt agents

Enter ‘Dialogflow’

Full press release here

 

Focus on code over infrastructure with Google App Engine Flexible Environment

App Development, Back-end, Cloud Computing, JavaScript, Node.js, Uncategorized, , , , , ,
The Google App Engine Flexible environment, which transitioned from Beta to GA a couple of months ago allows developers to focus on doing what they do best, writing code. Based on Google Compute Engine, the App Engine flexible environment automatically scales your app up and down while balancing the load.
 
Microservices, authorization, SQL and NoSQL databases, traffic splitting, logging, versioning, security scanning, and content delivery networks are all supported natively. In addition, the App Engine flexible environment allows you to customize the runtime and even the operating system of your virtual machine using Dockerfiles.
 

Continue reading →

Strong messaging with IronMQ

Cloud Computing

Need a good messaging queue but don’t want to tie yourself to AWS’s SNS/SQS or Google’s Pub Sub ? Then IronMQ from Iron.io might be the solution for you… Highly available and persistent by design, IronMQ is an industrial strength and cloud native messaging queue which helps to tie your distributed systems together.

Offering unicast and multicast ‘push’ queues , ‘pull’ queues , guaranteed ordering , error queues, super easy to use language libraries including Ruby, Python, PHP, .NET and Node.js – IronMQ has it all.

Continue reading →

Serverless v1.14 released

Agile, Amazon Web Services, App Development, HeartyHosting, Internet of Things, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Python, Stacy, , , ,

We love Serverless technology here at Boyle Software – being able to build applications comprised of microservices, which run in response to events, auto-scaling, being able to focus on the business problems rather than infrastructure, lower costs etc – the list goes on.

Continue reading →