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Javascript

Electron on Heroku

As maintainers of the open source framework Electron, we try to be diligent about the work we take on. Apps like Visual Studio Code, Slack, Notion, or 1Password are built on top of Electron and make use of our unique mix of native code and web technologies to make their users happy. That requires focus: There’s always more work to be done than we have time and resources for. In practice, that means that we don’t want to spend time thinking about the server infrastructure for the project‌ — ‌and we’re grateful for the support we receive from Heroku, where we can host load-intensive apps without worrying about managing the underlying infrastructure. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some of the ways in which we use Heroku.

Testing a React App in Chrome with Heroku CI

When building web applications, unit testing your individual components is certainly important. However, end-to-end testing provides assurance that the final user experience of your components chained together matches the expected behavior. Testing web application behavior locally in your browser can be helpful, but this approach isn’t efficient or reliable, especially as your application grows more complex.

Ideally, end-to-end tests in your browser are automated and integrated into your CI pipeline. Every time you commit a code change, your tests will run. Passing tests gives you the confidence that the application — as your end users experience it — behaves as expected.

Build Well-Documented and Authenticated APIs in Node.js with Fastify

If you’re an API developer working with Node.js, then you’re probably familiar with Express. But have you tried out the Fastify framework to build with power, speed, and convenience? In this walkthrough, we build a full-featured, easy-to-consume API with Fastify. And we deploy it to the cloud with ease. We show you how to:

  • Get started working with Fastify to build an API
  • Implement API authentication by using a JSON web token (JWT)
  • Use Fastify’s Swagger plugins to generate an OpenAPI specification
  • Consume the OpenAPI specification with Postman, giving you an API client that can send requests seamlessly to your back-end API
  • Deploy your application to Heroku

Working with ChatGPT Functions on Heroku

How to Build and Deploy a Node.js App That Uses OpenAI’s APIs

Near the end of 2023, ChatGPT announced that it had 100M weekly users. That’s a massive base of users who want to take advantage of the convenience and power of intelligent question answering with natural language.

With this level of popularity for ChatGPT, it’s no wonder that software developers are joining the ChatGPT app gold rush, building tools on top of OpenAI’s APIs. Building and deploying a GenAI-based app is quite easy to do—and we’re going to show you how!

Building a Monorepo with Yarn 2

In true JavaScript fashion, there was no shortage of releases in the JavaScript ecosystem this year. This includes the Yarn project’s release of Yarn 2 with a compressed cache of JavaScript dependencies, including a Yarn binary to reference, that can be used for a zero-install deployment.

Yarn is a package manager that also provides developers a project management toolset. Now, Yarn 2 is now officially supported by Heroku, and Heroku developers are able to take …

Celebrating 25 Years of JavaScript

JavaScript turns 25 years old today. While it’s made an impact on my career as a developer, it has also impacted many developers like me and users around the world. To commemorate our favorite language, we’ve collected 25 landmark events that have shaped the path of what the JavaScript ecosystem looks like today.

1995

1) JavaScript is created

In 1995, Brendan Eich, a developer at Netscape, known for their Netscape browser, was tasked with building …

Let’s Debug a Node.js Application

There are always challenges when it comes to debugging applications. Node.js’ asynchronous workflows add an extra layer of complexity to this arduous process. Although there have been some updates made to the V8 engine in order to easily access asynchronous stack traces, most of the time, we just get errors on the main thread of our applications, which makes debugging a little bit difficult. As well, when our Node.js applications crash, we usually need to rely on some complicated CLI tooling to analyze the core dumps.

Building a GraphQL API in JavaScript

Over the last few years, GraphQL has emerged as a very popular API specification that focuses on making data fetching easier for clients, whether the clients are a front-end or a third-party.

In a traditional REST-based API approach, the client makes a request, and the server dictates the response:

$ curl https://api.heroku.space/users/1 { "id": 1, "name": "Luke", "email": "luke@heroku.space", "addresses": [ { "street": "1234 Rodeo Drive", "city": "Los Angeles", "country": "USA" } ] }

But, …

Building with Web Components and Their Advantages Over Third-party Libraries

In the early years of web development, there were three standard fundamentals upon which every website was built: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As time passed, web developers became more proficient in their construction of fancy UI/UX widgets for websites. With the need for newer ways of crafting a site coming in conflict with the relatively slow adoption of newer standards, more and more developers began to build their own libraries to abstract away some of …

Let It Crash: Best Practices for Handling Node.js Errors on Shutdown

This blog post is adapted from a talk given by Julián Duque at NodeConf EU 2019 titled “Let it crash!.”

Before coming to Heroku, I did some consulting work as a Node.js solutions architect. My job was to visit various companies and make sure that they were successful in designing production-ready Node applications. Unfortunately, I witnessed many different problems when it came to error handling, especially on process shutdown. When an error …

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