In this article, Owais Afaq gives you hands-on access to his journey of creating a digital assistant capable of connecting with any system via a RESTful API to perform various tasks. He will create a chatbot using Node.js and Microsoft’s Bot Framework SDK; send the data collected from the user to an API; set up both local and server environments; and deploy it live on dev.botframework.com. In part 2 of this series, you’ll learn how to add natural language processing using LUIS to make our chatbot intelligent enough to understand human language and to extract information from a user’s utterances.
Read more…
Mad Libs is a game in which one player prompts others for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story, before reading the story aloud. In this article, Tom Hudson will use this game to show you how to build your own action for Google Home. He’s detailed steps to build a custom mad lib action, and He’ll explain why certain steps are important and ultimately how they fit into the voice services world. After this exercise, you will better understand voice services and begin your path to programming actions for Google Home.
Read more…
For every application Yury Dymov works on, he needs to decide how to manage the data. The problem can be broken down into the following three subproblems: Fetch data from the back end, store it somewhere locally in the front-end application, retrieve the data from the local store and format it as required by the particular view or screen. In this article, Yury sums up his experience with consuming data from JSON, the JSON API and GraphQL back ends, and it gives practical recommendations on how to manage front-end application data.
Read more…
Imagine an archaic, alien workflow, with ancient tooling, and none of those things you love about the web. How would your career be affected? As a web developer, not only do you already possess all of the skills to make great modern desktop apps, but thanks to powerful new APIs at your disposal, the desktop is actually where your skills can be leveraged the most. In this article, Adam Lynch will look at the development of desktop applications using NW.js and Electron, the ups and downs of building one and living with one, using one code base for the desktop and the web, and more.
Read more…
Wondering how to get started with the Web Speech API? If you’re unfamiliar, this API gives you (the developer) the ability to voice-enable your website in two directions: listening to your users via the SpeechRecognition interface and talking back to them via the SpeechSynthesis interface. In this article, Aaron Gustafson guides you through this experimental API and covers everything you need to know to help you get a better understanding of how it works.
Read more…
In this article, Lea Verou explains what an HTML API is, why they’re useful, and which important lesson developers can learn from them. Keep reading to find out how to design a good one. You might be wondering, “All HTML and CSS authors know JavaScript, right?” Wrong. Take a look at the results of following poll.
Read more…
What would Apple gain by letting developers build web apps that don’t need to go in the App Store? Is iOS holding us back? In this article, Stéphanie Walter presents some of the cool things you can do with APIs and other technologies to make your users’ lives easier. The future of the mobile browser is bright, shiny and fun. We can and will be able to build incredibly powerful things with web technologies.
Read more…
After building several client websites, ranging from small cafés to growing startups, Stefan Judis figured out that the holy WYSIWYG editor is not always the silver bullet we’re all looking for. These interfaces aim to make building websites easy, but there are always more use cases for your content on different platforms. In this article Stefan Judis will show you what he built and how his website surprisingly turned out to be his daily companion.
Read more…
One of the upcoming features of JavaScript that I especially like is the support for asynchronous functions. In this article, I would like to show you a very practical example of building a server-side application using Koa 2, a new version of the web framework, which relies heavily on this feature.
First, I’ll recap what async functions are and how they work. Then, I’ll highlight the differences between Koa 1 and Koa 2. After that, I will describe my demo app for Koa 2, covering all aspects of development, including testing (using Mocha, Chai and Supertest) and deployment (using PM2).
Read more…
Part of what makes WordPress so versatile is its powerful plugin system, which makes it incredibly easy to add functionality. In this article, Emerson Loustau will walk you through how he made GitHub Pipeline, a plugin that allows you to display data from the GitHub API on WordPress pages using shortcodes. By the end of this article you will have a clear understanding of the moving pieces involved in creating a WordPress plugin that consumes third-party service APIs, and hopefully you are inspired to write your own WordPress API plugin!
Read more…
