Coding

The latest version of OpenText AppWorks Cloud Edition (CE) 20.2 was recently released and promises to improve “developer agility through simplification and improved visibility with a new List Designer, new Action Bar Designer and added support for full translation of layouts.” In addition this release comes available packaged in a Docker container, which makes it much easier to setup locally as a development environment or to simply try out the new features of this release. ...

In programming, there are many ways to work with strings. A performant way to work with them is through the use of Regular expressions, also known as Regex. By using regular expressions, you can search for a substring within a string, replace a substring within a string, and extract information from that string. Regular expressions are supported in almost every language. There can be small differences, but the general concept is the same. Javascript is one of the few languages that has direct built-in support for regular expressions. ...

EcmaScript is the standardized scripting language that JavaScript and some other languages, like ActionScript implement. JavaScript was invented by Brendan Eich in 1995 and became an ECMA standard in 1997. ECMAScript 2015 is version 6 of the ECMA Script programming language therefore known as ES6. There are many new features in ES6 which are listed below. Block Scoping The lack of block scoping created confusion in ES5. A new keyword let works similarly to var but the variable it declares is block-scoped and exists within the current block only. ...

The way in which logical structure of a document is accessed and manipulated in HTML is known as Document Object Model or DOM. It is a programming interface for HTML. Whenever a document loads in the browser, a tree-like (or forest) structure is created. Methods provided by the DOM can be used to access and manipulate this tree programmatically. Why use DOM? The DOM is used to access and manipulate elements in an HTML document. But why do we need to use the DOM for this? Let’s understand this by use of an example. Let’s suppose we have an input field and a button next to it. When the button is clicked, whatever typed in the input field should appear below the input field. How can we do this with plain HTML? We need to dynamically access the value of the input field on the button click and then display the value below in a paragraph. We will implement this example, but first, we should discuss DOM methods that will be needed for accessing and manipulating elements. ...

If you’ve been doing any development in Angular, the chances are you have been using Visual Studio Code (VS Code) for your editor. If you haven’t been using Visual Studio Code, I highly recommend checking it out. There are a number of extensions that I have come to rely on that greatly simplify my development workflow listed below. I’ve included my favorite top ten with their descriptions and links below. To install them, simply start VS Code and open the command palette (Ctrl-Shift-P) Windows / Linux or (Cmd-Shift-P) Mac, and select Install Extension. Choose the extension name from the list and once installed reload/restart Visual Studio Code. Hopefully you will find these extensions as useful I do. ...

The last couple of lessons focused on arrays, and hopefully by now you will have come to see the value of using them in your code. Objects expand on the concept of arrays, except for a few differences, which provide greater control of the data stored. It is said, in Javascript, “Almost everything is objects”. Dates are always objects, Arrays are always objects, functions are always objects, and regular expressions are always objects. Primitive data types such as Numbers, Boolean and Strings are also objects when defined with the new keyword. ...

While keyword research, link-building, content optimization, and other on-page strategies can improve your domain’s search ranking, search engine optimization (SEO) starts with getting your pages indexed and to do that you need to ensure they’re crawler-friendly. Crawler bots, like human users, appreciate sites which have clear, structured, readable data. However, since crawlers can only spend a limited amount of time and resources per site, domains with incoherent site maps, broken links, or 404 errors might not get indexed at all, effectively invisibilizing it for all potential users. ...

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is the most common programming type and an essential part of popular programming languages, such as Java, C++ and C#. Its name offers an insight into how OOP languages work, which is by revolving around objects and using objects to get things done. The term object refers to a chunk of code that acts together as a whole and can be reused at any time, as well as interact with other objects. Some of the very basic elements of OOP include objects, classes and methods. Object-oriented programming works in a way that enables programmers to reuse their code and use it in multiple different instances, without having to write the code all over again. ...

ES6 introduced a number of exciting features to the JavaScript standard classes, string templates, array and object de-structuring, block-scope variable declarations with “let” and “const”, and perhaps the most visible new feature, arrow functions. Arrow functions have quickly become the standard way of writing functions among professional JavaScript developers. Because they are so widespread, it’s essential for every JavaScript programmer to understand arrow functions - what they are, how to write them, and how they are different from ordinary functions. ...

Anyone who has worked in JavaScript for any amount of time will likely come across concepts that require a deeper level of study in order to fully understand. Closures is certainly one of those areas that has caused me to review and experiment with several times. The purpose of this article is to provide a succinct overview of closures and offer several snippets of code to play around with in order to better understand this often tricky to grasp concept. Consciously or Unconsciously, most developers use closures while programming in JavaScript. Most of the time, everything works fine, but it is always better to understand how they work as they provide better control over your code. Moreover, at some point you might be asked to explain what closures are and hopefully by the end of this you will be in a much better position to do that. So let’s start with what a closure is. A simplified explanation would be that a closure is an inner function that has access to the variables of the outer function. This is called the scope chain. See my earlier article on JavaScript Scope if you need a refresher. ...