Suppose you are hosting your app on Heroku or some similar provider, and you rely on Facebook Connect for user authentication. How do you run your app locally so that you can develop and test without messing with the live version? Using a third party API like Facebook Connect makes it tricky because you need […]
When you start working with Node/Mongodb you probably will resort to the native Date object to play around with and store dates. I did it too, only to discover that you will face a lot of timezone related problems if you do that. Mongodb stores dates on the UTC timezone as default, but your Node […]
Lately I have been working on a hobby programming project that automatically converts text or web pages into videos. Many functionalities of the software come from an open source project called FFmpeg. It is great for working with video and images. Below you will find the commands and annotations I made over the past few […]
Below you’ll find some useful resources and tutorials for developing Node.js apps with Express.js and MongoDB. MongoDB MongoDB Tutorial Cloud MongoDB Service MLab toArray in MongoDB Node.js/Express.je HTML to Jade/Pug Converter Bcrypt module usage Social authentication with passport
Lately I have been playing a lot with Node.js and event-driven programming, and several ‘gotcha’ moments occurred. Below you’ll find of them. Event-Driven Programming: As the name implies, a programming paradigm where the flow of the program is governed by events. There is a main loop monitoring things and triggering the appropriate callbacks. Noje.js: Contrary […]
Below you’ll find the basic steps to deploy a Node.js (should apply to other languages and frameworks as well) on Heroku. It assumes you have Git and Heroku toolbelt installed. You can view a more detailed tutorial here. 1. Create the app locally (you can view a “Hello World” example here) 2. git init 3. […]
Git is one of the most popular version control systems out there. Below you’ll find the basic commands you need to get started with it. Note: One important aspect to understand about Git is that it thinks about data as snapshots of files over time. Every commit will generate a new snapshot, that is independent […]
Many types of applications that interact with Facebook will need to use webhooks. Messenger chat bots are an example. If you follow Facebook’s setup guide, you’ll notice that the example provided to activate a webhook for the first time is in Node.js: app.get('/webhook', function (req, res) { if (req.query['hub.verify_token'] === 'YOUR_VERIFY_TOKEN') { res.send(req.query['hub.challenge']); } else […]
As you probably know, you can’t send AJAX (XMLHttpRequest) requests to another domain. Browsers block it because of the Same Origin Policy, a rule used to make sure that a malicious script won’t be able to access data on other pages. This can be a problem, however, if you need to load data for a […]
It looks like JavaScript is taking the crown from Ruby for modern web development. I never used it in the backend, so I was curious to research about the libraries and frameworks that the cool kids are using these days. Here are some of them: node.js – event-driven runtime environment for developing server-side applications . […]