7 posts tagged with "Backend"

Introduction​

There are many excellent open-source projects on GitHub, where the code is transparent and available to everyone. As software developer, we can learn a lot from them including software engineering, unit testing, coding style standardization, etc. We can even find issues by looking into their code, and submit pull requests to contribute to tech communities. Today we are going to dig into the source code of a popular Golang open-source project on GitHub, robfig/cron, which is small and with clear annotations, and is very suitable for new developers to learn how to read and analyze source code.

Environment Preparation​

First, we are going to fork the project into our personal repo. We can do so by clicking the Fork button and enter the project name. After it's forked, we can either download to our local, or click Create codespace on master to create a Codespace on the GitHub repo's home page. Codespace is a Azure-based GitHub service that allows developers to develop remotely, and it is now available to individuals. Let's give it a try!

After clicking, a new page will be opened in the browser, where there is a web interface of VS Code, displaying the directory, code and terminal of the project. See the figure below.

Introduction​

Nowadays, many cloud-native and distributed systems such as Kubernetes are written in Go. This is because Go natively supports not only asynchronous programming but also static typing to ensure system stability. My open-source project Crawlab, a web crawler management platform, has applied distributed architecture. This article will introduce about how to design and implement a simple distributed system.

Ideas​

Before we start to code, we need to think about what we need to implement.

• Master Node: A central control system, similar to a troop commander to issue orders
• Worker Node: Executors, similar to soldiers to execute tasks

Apart from the concepts above, we would need to implement some simple functionalities.

Introduction​

Task Scheduling is one of the most important features in software systems, which literally means assigning and executing long tasks or scripts according to certain specifications. In the web crawler management platform Crawlab, task scheduling serves as a core module, which you may wonder how to build it from scratch. This article will introduce you how to build a simple but useful task scheduler with Go.

Idea​

Let's focus on what we need for the task scheduling system.

• User Interface: API
• Scheduler: Cron
• Execute Tasks: Executor

Below is the basic process.

We can use HTTP API to create scheduled tasks, and the executor will execute scripts periodically based on their specifications.

Preface​

Today's heroes in this world are only you and me. -- Cao Cao, "Romance of the Three Kingdoms"

For programmers who have been working in the IT industry for many years, if asked about the most mainstream backend programming language in China, I believe most would say Java. This isn't surprising, as Java has existed for over 30 years, has a massive user base and ecosystem, and seems to hold an absolute dominant position in the software engineering field. However, as ancient wisdom says: "Those who win the hearts of the people win the world." The programming language with the most users isn't necessarily the most beloved by developers. According to StackOverflow's 2021 survey of 82,914 developers on programming language satisfaction, only 47% liked Java, ranking it beyond 20th place, barely higher than PHP, C, and COBOL. On the other hand, we can see from the survey results that C#, often called the "knockoff Java," actually achieved 62% satisfaction among developers, 15% higher than Java. Although C#'s satisfaction still has a considerable gap compared to Rust and TypeScript, we can see that C# as an alternative programming language to Java is gradually gaining advantages in development efficiency, deployment convenience, and documentation completeness. Due to work requirements, I've used both C# and Java to develop numerous projects, giving me some understanding of their similarities, differences, advantages, and disadvantages. I believe there are good reasons why C# is more popular among developers than Java - it offers a great development experience.

Due to length constraints, the complete introduction to C# principles and practical applications (i.e., why I recommend using C# to build large-scale backend applications) will be split into a series of articles. This series will deeply analyze this "young" programming language from dimensions such as syntax features, development patterns, ecosystem, deployment and building, using the cross-platform framework .NET Core as an example to introduce how to build large-scale backend applications with C#.

This article is the first in the C# series, primarily introducing some modern syntax features of C# and how they improve development efficiency.

Introduction​

Those outside the city want to get in, those inside the city want to get out. -- Qian Zhongshu "Fortress Besieged"

With the continuous popularity of Container Orchestration, Microservices, Cloud Technology and other trends in the IT industry, Golang (Go language, abbreviated as Go), born at Google in 2009, is increasingly welcomed and sought after by software engineers, becoming today's hottest backend programming language. In the list of software projects developed with Golang, there are star-level products like Docker (container technology) and Kubernetes (container orchestration) that have disrupted the entire IT industry, as well as powerful and practical well-known projects like Prometheus (monitoring system), Etcd (distributed storage), and InfluxDB (time-series database). Of course, Go language's application domains are by no means limited to containers and distributed systems. Today, many large internet companies are extensively using Golang to build backend Web applications, such as Toutiao, JD.com, Qiniu Cloud, etc. The web scraping field, long dominated by Python, is also being continuously challenged by Golang due to the rise of the simple and easy-to-use scraping framework Colly. Golang has become the programming language that most software engineers want to learn today. The image below shows relevant results from HackerRank's 2020 programmer skills survey.

So, is Go language really a lifesaver for backend developers? Can it effectively improve programmers' technical capabilities and development efficiency, thus helping them advance further in their careers? Is Go language really worth spending a lot of time learning in depth? This article will provide detailed introduction to Golang's language characteristics, its advantages and disadvantages, and applicable scenarios. With the above questions in mind, it will analyze various aspects of Go language to help programmers new to the IT industry and developers interested in Go to further understand this popular language.

Introduction​

The only constant in the world is change.

世界上唯一不变的是变化。--《谁动了我的奶酪》作者 斯宾塞·约翰逊

The IT industry changes too fast, especially frontend development. If you could travel back 10 years and meet a Web development software engineer, they would definitely tell you that mastering frontend means being proficient with jQuery and solving IE browser compatibility issues. However, with the continuous development of frontend, jQuery faced "official retirement" and gradually exited the historical stage (element selection and manipulation were unified by standard DOM APIs); the much-criticized IE browser compatibility problems, due to IE's gradually shrinking market and the emergence of compatibility tools (Polyfill), have been downgraded from core optimization issues to minor annoyances, no longer being standard equipment for frontend engineers.

Today's frontend development has a dazzling array of professional terminology and complex technology ecosystems, which may make engineers new to frontend development feel anxious: there's simply too much to learn. Modern frontend engineers who don't understand Webpack, Babel, Node.js, NPM/Yarn, ES6/7, React/Vue, Sass/Less, TypeScript, ESLint, Canvas/SVG and other modern frontend knowledge will find it difficult to convince others of their professional background. Frontend engineers in 2021 may be true engineers in every sense of the word. They typically need to apply extensive professional knowledge to solve engineering problems, including how to modularize projects, how to design interactions between components, how to improve reusability, how to enhance bundling efficiency, optimize browser rendering performance, etc. They no longer just need the HTML/CSS/JS routine to develop static pages like before.

This article will focus on the theme of modern frontend development to introduce various important technologies of frontend engineering in detail, helping readers understand how the complexity and diversity of modern frontend pages are constructed. This article is a popular science piece about frontend engineering—even if you don't understand frontend technology, you can benefit from this article.

Introduction​

A craftsman must first sharpen his tools if he is to do his work well. -- The Analects of Confucius

In today's frontend landscape dominated by three major frameworks, very few people don't know Vue. In 2014, former Google engineer Evan You released what's called a progressive frontend application framework, Vue. Its simplified template binding and component-based thinking had a positive and profound impact on the frontend field that was still in the jQuery era. The birth of Vue benefited frontend developers who weren't comfortable with TS or JSX syntax. Moreover, Vue's low learning threshold also makes it very easy for beginners to get started. This is also an important reason why Vue could spread rapidly in a short time. From the State of JS survey, we can see that Vue's awareness is close to 100%, and overall user satisfaction is also quite high.

Vue is both powerful and easy to learn—does this mean Vue is a perfect framework? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Although Vue has a low entry threshold and is flexible and easy to use, this advantage also becomes a double-edged sword, bringing certain limitations for building large projects. Many frontend engineers who have developed large projects with Vue 2 have a love-hate relationship with Vue. However, with the release of Vue 3, these disadvantages that became prominent when developing large projects have been effectively resolved, making the Vue framework very versatile and truly having the potential to compete with "frontend framework leader" React. What important new features does Vue 3 bring? This article will provide a detailed introduction.