powered by Para
2016
 

Implementing full-text search for your static site

Static site generators are great — they get the job done quickly for our blogs, landing pages and project websites. They make it easy to build something, deploy it and forget it — free hosting, nothing to maintain, a sort of “serverless” technology. Static sites are perfect for content which rarely changes. They lack dynamic features, but the main problem is that you can’t search quickly for a piece of content without leaving the site, which hinders the user experience.

We generate our blog using Hexo, a simple static site generator, and we’re quite happy with it. We’ve always felt that our search box could be improved and sending users off to Google was just sloppy. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you can also upgrade the search box on your blog or static site.

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Saving money on DynamoDB with Global Secondary Indexes

Amazon’s DynamoDB is a fully managed database service running inside the AWS cloud which is super-scalable and fast. It is perfect for write-intensive workflows and low-latency queries. Its main advantages are the adjustable read and write performance and global secondary indexes (GSI).

We migrated from Cassandra to DynamoDB a while back. This decision was taken mainly because of the tunable performance and also because it’s a managed service and we had one less thing to maintain. Later we found out that global indexes could help us save a lot of extra costs and so we implemented a simple solution, which we call “shared tables”.

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An open source backend for the Internet of Things

Things — those small, connected devices are now part of our daily lives. As we transition our focus from mobile to broader IoT development, the need for reliable and open source backend systems increases. There are so many applications for IoT — smart thermostats, air conditioning controllers, DIY home automation systems based on Raspberry Pi and Arduino, to name a few. We were planning to add IoT support to Para for a while now but it was only after a fellow developer’s suggestion that we realized we should’ve done this sooner.

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Building a full stack application from scratch with Angular

UPDATE: This article and its associated code have been updated for Angular 8.x. The same article is also available for React.

In this tutorial we’re going to build a simple single-page application with Angular (v8 and above). This is intended for developers unfamiliar with the new framework or having some experience with AngularJS. First of all, I got Visual Studio Code installed on my machine and it’s running on Linux. I chose VS Code because we’ll be working with TypeScript mostly and it has great support for it, but you can code in your favourite IDE as well. Originally, the code in this article was based on the excellent Angular 2 Seed project by Minko Gechev That project is now deprecated in favor of Angular CLI and the code here has been migrated to use the new official build tool for Angular. You’ll also need to have Git, Node.js and npm installed.

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jPrime roundup, Para client for iOS and Swift

Last week was jPrime 2016, the biggest Java conference on the Balkans. It was a huge success — more than 500 visitors, two tracks in two days. The slogan was “Java - 21 and legally drunk” and the two main themes were microservices and reactive programming with RxJava. This was the second year in a row for the conference which is organized by the community, i.e. fellow Java developers from the BGJUG. By being silver sponsors, we made a humble contribution which helped the community organize this great event.

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Para Web Console - the admin UI for your backend

We’ve released a simple web management console for Para. It’s open source, client-side only and lets you connect to any of your Para servers and manage your objects easily through the web interface. It’s powered by AngularJS and uses the great libraries ng-admin and Restangular. The console works for both local and remotely deployed servers and you are more than welcome to modify it for your needs. We’d appreciate any pull requests on GitHub.

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Para v1.18 released, new site and jPrime

This past month was interesting and quite busy for us - we got valuable feedback and contributions from our clients, fixed many bugs, released the Android client for Para and a new plugin for MongoDB. The number one request for this version was support for plugins and MongoDB. We’ve also updated the documentation of our open source backend framework and redesigned the landing page on paraio.org. The docs should now look even better on mobile devices with high-DPI displays.

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