Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, began as a means of transferring hypertext documents from a local server. A hypertext document is a document that supports clickable links to other places in the document, or to places in other documents. This … Continued
An application programming interface, or API, is a software program that defines a way to programmatically perform an interaction with a particular system, or interface with it. Web APIs, then, allow a browser or server to programmatically alter and extend … Continued
HTTP Performance Optimizations Performance optimizations center around reducing latency. Here are some ways to do that. Connection Reuse One way to reduce latency is to reduce internet traffic by reducing the number of connections required to request the content that … Continued
Cohesion and coupling are architectural concerns in the design of well-formed objects. Well-formed objects are cohesive and loosely coupled. Poor cohesion and tight coupling are design flaws, and are reasons to refactor a class architecture. (For an overview of object-oriented … Continued
Objects In general terms, objects are units of reusable software functionality. Different objects can be assembled together to become parts of software applications. Objects expose their functionality through properties and methods. Properties define, store and expose attributes, and methods define … Continued
Inheritance Inheritance is a core concept in object-oriented design. For an overview of object-oriented design, have a look at Object-Oriented Design Basics: Objects, Classes and Inheritance. Inheritance is the ability of one class (a “subclass”) to use the state and … Continued
What is Polymorphism? Polymorphism is the ability to represent different sets of data and different behaviors with a common interface. Typically, this means two classes that have the same methods but different implementations of those methods. A good analogy is … Continued
What Is Recursion? A recursive function is a function that invokes itself. This process of self-invoking is called recursion. So that a recursive function will not invoke itself infinitely, it must include an exit condition. This bit of code demonstrates … Continued
This example uses the Handlebars API to display data. I’ll use a Web API (created by Daniel Schmitz, full database here) to get data from Microsoft’s venerable Northwind sample database, and Handlebars to display the data. Specifically, I’ll display a … Continued
Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Code By default, code in JavaScript executes synchronously, meaning one line after the next. This means that a line of code can’t execute until all of the previous lines of code in its lexical scope have finished … Continued