Joyful Tech: GraphQL, Chrome Security, and Firebug
Here at Bendyworks our mission statement is to share joy and success in our craft so every once in a while we like to highlight tech news that makes us joyful. Here are some interesting things we saw from Oct 21st through Oct 27th.
Saying Goodbye to Firebug
So it’s sad that Firebug is now reaching end-of-life in the Firefox browser, with the release of Firefox Quantum (version 57) next month. The good news is that all the capabilities of Firebug are now present in current Firefox Developer Tools.
Apollo Client 2.0
Apollo Client is the ultra-flexible, community-driven GraphQL client for React, Vue.js, Angular, and other JavaScript platforms. You just describe your data requirements with a GraphQL query, and Apollo Client fetches and manages the data for you.
GraphQL Fragments are the Best Match for UI Components
To build anything complicated, the one and only truly helpful strategy is to split what needs to be built into smaller parts and then focus on one part at a time.
Introducing the Chrome User Experience Report
Chrome was founded to push the web forward, and a key part of that is enabling developers to improve their user experience. Although current tools allow developers to understand how real-world users experience their own sites, they have never provided insight into comparisons with other sites or macro user experience trends across the web.
Say "yes" to HTTPS: Chrome secures the web, one site at a time
About a year ago, we announced that we would begin marking all sites that are not encrypted with HTTPS as “not secure” in Chrome. We wanted to help people understand when the site they're on is not secure, and at the same time, provide motivation to that site's owner to improve the security of their site. We knew this would take some time, and so we started by only marking pages without encryption that collect passwords and credit cards.
Ionic: 2017-18 Roadmap
The Ionic team had an incredibly busy and productive summer and rolled into a very productive fall. We released some new projects, soft launched our new Ionic Pro commercial offering, and are growing the team to make Ionic Framework and our services around it better and better.
Using Trusted Web Activity
At the Chrome Developer Summit 2017 (October 2017) we’ve announced a new technology called Trusted Web activities which are now available in Chrome’s Canary channel. Trusted Web activities are a new way to integrate your web-app content such as your PWA with your Android app using a similar protocol to Chrome Custom Tabs.
The Output Element
Last night I was rooting around in the cellars of a particularly large codebase and stumbled upon our
normalize.csswhich makes sure that all of our markup renders in a similar way across different browsers. I gave it a quick skim and found styles for a rather peculiar element called<output>that I'd never seen or even heard of before.
Dynamic module imports, async iterators and generators, Device Memory API, and permissions UI changes
Currently, importing JavaScript modules is completely static, and developers cannot import modules based on runtime conditions, like whether a user is logged in. Starting in this release, the import(specifier) syntax now allows developers to dynamically load code into modules and scripts at runtime. This can be used for lazy loading a script only when it’s needed, which improves performance of the application.
Deep Dive into Object Detection with Open Images, using Tensorflow
The new Open Images dataset gives us everything we need to train computer vision models, and just happens to be perfect for a demo! Tensorflow’s Object Detection API and its ability to handle large volumes of data make it a perfect choice
Can You Afford It?: Real-world Web Performance Budgets
Performance budgets are an essential but under-appreciated part of product success and team health. Most partners we work with are not aware of the real-world operating environment and make inappropriate technology choices as a result.