web app | Björn Wilmsmann

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.

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

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

Documentation and Spreadsheets with an API: GitBook and Fieldbook

Continuing on last week's post about RunKit - a Node.js prototyping environment for the browser - here are two interesting tools that make use of RunKit: GitBook is a collaborative documentation tool that allows you to create beautiful, version-controlled documentation for your software. It's used by software components like Redux and it leverages RunKit to embed live, reactive code examples in your documentation. Fieldbook is was a database creation tool thats touted as "A database with an API – as simple as a ...

Sunday February 19th, 2017 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

Deploying Spring Boot applications as old-fashioned WAR files

Spring Boot is an opinionated convention-over-configuration framework for creating stand-alone Spring-based Java applications. Its objective is to provide you with a preselected best practice choice of libraries (both from the Spring platform and by third parties) for a given task, e.g. building a web application that connects to a database and provides REST resources creating a scheduled batch task that exports and aggregates data from various data sources providing an API that connects to SOAP Web Services It both helps you with getting started quickly and ...

Sunday February 5th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Exporting table data in web applications as CSV or Excel files

In business applications being able to export data to Microsoft Excel is a very common requirement. In most business environments Excel is the go-to tool for business analytics and quick-and-easy data processing. Hence, being able to communicate with Excel is an essential feature for most kinds of business software. The usual approach for meeting that requirement is generating a CSV file on the server. However, while simple this approach can come with a few downsides: While CSV is a useful, accessible plain text ...

Sunday January 29th, 2017 by Bjoern in 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

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.

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