my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Paul Verbeek-Mas @ RuhrJS 2017 – Calendar / Kalender / تقويم (aka, the fun of locali[zs]ation)

At RuhrJS 2017 Paul Verbeek-Mas gave an interesting talk on the joys and intricacies of i18n and l10n with regard to how time, dates and calendars are rendered in web apps:

Sunday January 7th, 2018 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Rachel Andrew @ RuhrJS 2017: Start Using CSS Grid Layout Today

As the obligatory CSS person at a JavaScript conference, at RuhrJS 2017 CSS expert Rachel Andrew gave a talk on CSS grid layouts and how they differ from flexbox layouts:

Sunday December 17th, 2017 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Sara Harkousse @ RuhrJS 2017 – Web Components: It’s all rainbows and unicorns! Is it?

At RuhrJS 2017 Sara Harkousse gave a talk on web components and custom elements in particular. In this talk she gives a hands-on introduction on how to get started with custom elements:

Sunday December 10th, 2017 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

12 Factors for Building Quality Web Applications

When considering the different aspects that potentially contribute to (or detract from, mark you ...) quality, reliability and maintainability of a web application I always like to come back to the Twelve-Factor App. Originally created by Adam Wiggins in 2011 the Twelve-Factor App is a highly useful design framework for both creating new web apps and measuring and improving the quality of existing applications. This framework allows you to create and maintain long-term viable applications that make use of declarative formats, clearly ...

Sunday November 26th, 2017 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

Microservices and Decoupling Front-end Components

Microservices have become a common design pattern for splitting up and modularising monolithic applications. The indiscriminate application of this particular design pattern is quite a bit worrying, though. A few months ago I gave this answer to the question what the biggest struggle with Microservices is: Convincing people that microservices are not a cure-all but just another design pattern. You have to start out with a monolith and only if you realise along the way that some components might work better as a ...

Sunday November 19th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Web Apps and Websites: Documents and Applications

Today, when starting development of a new website using a pattern that just a few years ago used to be called single-page application (SPA) not only seems to be the new default but even like the only way of creating stuff for the web. Clearly though not all content for the web is created equal: On one side of the spectrum we have (mostly) static documents identified by URIs and returned by URLs. Most websites that simply provide content (news sites for ...

Sunday November 12th, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web Applications

More on JSON and REST API Specifications

Expanding on my previous posts about annotating and validating JSON data structure with JSON Schema defining and documenting REST APIs using Swagger I have two additional suggestions for tools that help you define and build HTTP-based APIs in a less haphazard, more deliberate manner: JSON API: While JSON Schema allows you to annotate and validate JSON-based data types JSON API gives you clear, opinionated guidelines for structuring JSON API responses so you don't have think about those implementation details yourself. Having uniform guidelines for API ...

Sunday October 29th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Iconic and Feather: 2 Icon Sets Designed for the Web

With icon fonts such as Font Awesome, Material Design Icons and Glyphicons there's certainly no shortage of icons for use in web applications. Iconic and Feather are 2 alternatives to these widely-used icon collections. The latter is available for free under the MIT licence (a donation will be very much appreciated, though) while the former can be purchased for $129 ($39 for just the Webfont without SVGs) for a single app licence. Both are framework-agnostic and Iconic in particular has been designed from ...

Sunday October 1st, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web, Web Applications

JHipster: Generate And Bootstrap CRUD Apps With Spring Boot And Angular

The previous two posts in my series on helpful tools for developing CRUD applications were about tools that addressed very specific problem areas: API format specifications and code generation from those specifications in particular. This post will be both less about APIs and solving specific CRUD-related problems but about a tool that deals with CRUD app requirements in a comprehensive manner. This tool I'm talking about is called - not so slightly tongue-in-cheek - JHipster. Both inspired by tried-and-true frameworks like Ruby on ...

Sunday September 17th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Swagger: A Roundtrip Tool For Creating And Consuming REST APIs

In this second part of my series on useful tools for developing CRUD applications I'd like to introduce Swagger and Swagger Codegen in particular. Introduce perhaps isn't exactly the right word because first of all Swagger is quite well known in developer circles these days. Secondly, a few months ago I wrote a blog post about how to use Swagger to generate client SDKs for REST APIs. Swagger - originally having originated at Wordnik is a tool for documenting and publishing their ...

Sunday September 10th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.