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.

ng-admin: Create admin panels from REST APIs

ng-admin is a helpful AngularJS UI component that automatically creates an admin user interface for RESTful APIs. Such a component is particularly useful for instance with back end applications in enterprise contexts because it allows you to quickly implement and iterate basic user interfaces based on your current model and its API.

Modern SQL (with PostgreSQL)

SQL expert Markus Winand some time ago posted an insightful presentation on Modern SQL (mostly PostgreSQL-focussed) at SlideShare. The 116 slides contain plenty of modern SQL idioms you likely haven't used before. Even if you're an experienced SQL developer the presentation is still worth checking out.

Sunday June 28th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

UX Time: Responsive Tables and Smoothly Scrolling Through Large Datasets

Today I'd like to introduce two nifty and very useful tools and techniques for better visualizing tabular data on the Web: Responsive Tables in Pure CSS: This technique (code available here) makes clever use of :before and :after pseudo elements in order to nicely display responsive HTML tables on mobile devices (or any device with a smaller screen size for that matter) without any changes to the HTML code or having to resort to JavaScript. Clusterize.js, a JavaScript plugin that allows you to ...

Sunday May 17th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

JHipster: A Spring / AngularJS App Generator

You're a boring, hoary Java developer but secretly always wanted to belong to that hip JavaScript-Single-Page-Application crowd? Well, with JHipster now you can! On a more serious note, JHipster is a Yeoman generator that lets you bootstrap integrated Java (for the back-end server stuff) / AngularJS (for everything front-end and UI) web apps. JHipster makes use of proven technologies such as: Grunt Bower AngularJS Maven Spring Boot Spring Web MVC The project's goal is to provide the means for easily creating a beautiful state-of-the-art HTML5 / CSS3 / JavaScript ...

Sunday May 3rd, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Web Applications

SheetJS – Parse And Manipulate Excel Spreadsheets In The Browser

SheetJS (source code available on GitHub) is an extremely useful JavaScript library that enables you to have Microsoft Excel spreadsheets parsed directly in the browser without any backend interaction necessary. What makes SheetJS even more impressive is the ability to query spreadsheets in-place with an SQLite-compatible SQL language called WebSQL. Check out the example on the website to see how awesome this is. Together with a grid component such as Handsontable (source code) SheetJS allows for on-the-fly display, querying and manipulation of Excel ...

Sunday April 19th, 2015 by Bjoern in Web Applications

favico.js – Dynamic Content For Your Favicon

favico.js (source code on GitHub) is an interesting and possibly quite useful library that makes it possible to show dynamic, animated content in your web app's favicon. While it allows you to display all sorts of visual next to the browser's address bar - such as videos or even web cams live streams - the most useful use case favico.js lends itself to probably is displaying badges and notifications. favico.js provides animations, colour customization and custom fonts for these badges. Check out the ...

Sunday April 12th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web Applications

GoodUI Datastories

GoodUI Datastories is a new service that promises to provide companies with tried and tested UI concepts. Not every company has the time, resources and sheer number of users required to do proper A/B testing. GoodUI Datastories tries to alleviate this problem by sharing ideas and UX patterns that have been proven to work for others, e.g.: Try Smaller Commitments instead of one big one. The service allows users to submit their ideas including screenshots and traffic / conversion data as evidence the ...

Sunday March 1st, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web, Web Applications

UX Check: Identify Usability Issues On Your Website

Recently, I came across UX Check, a Google Chrome extension that allows you to annotate usability issues according to Nielsen's ten heuristic usability evaluations. If you're dealing with website and web app usability in any way UX Check will be a useful tool and is worth checking out.

Sunday February 8th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web Applications

FormatJS: Localize dates and numbers

Internationalization and localization still is a somewhat difficult problem in software development. FormatJS is a collection of JavaScript libraries that addresses a part of this problem by formatting dates and numbers according to a selected locale. It makes clever use of pluralization and natural language patterns so the output strings read like a natural language utterance instead of a computer-generated string, for example it generates these outputs for 0, 1 and 1,000 items, respectively: "Annie took no photos on December 14, 2014." "Annie took ...

Sunday December 28th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

ZenQuery is now open source

Today I made ZenQuery available as open source (under the Apache License). ZenQuery is an 'Enterprise Backend as a Service' and allows you to easily access databases through a REST API without any programming knowledge required. Get SQL result sets as JSON, XML or CSV data, which can easily be processed by tools such as MS Excel or in your own applications. ZenQuery provides you with an instant REST API for your SQL queries. Anything that can be expressed by SELECT * FROM ...

Saturday December 20th, 2014 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.