AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a JavaScript library, created by Google, which is used to improve the user experience of browsing websites on mobile devices by reducing page size. This reduction lowers data usage and reduces page load times by incorporating the following techniques:
The tech community is debating the question of whether to use a responsive website or a native mobile app.
The answer is, “it depends.” Before deciding, ask who the user is and what do they want to do? Once you know, the information below can help you determine which technology to use.
The CDC Integrated Surveillance Portal (CISP) prototype is a comprehensive, real-time, interactive resource for CDC, its partners, and the public to explore and discover information about the full inventory of CDC’s Surveillance Systems, Programs, Registries, Health Surveys, Tools, and Collaboratives. CISP contains not only descriptive information about these CDC resources — CISP also describes the relationships between resources.
So, as with most things related to Angular, if there is an option to use Angular, or another (JQuery, JavaScript, Some-Other-Library-That-Is-Not-Angular) resource, we recommending using Angular.
One of the things that caused some mild consternation in our first Scrum sprint was Angular and IE9. For those unfamiliar with Scrum, it is a specific agile software development framework / methodology for managing product development. A sprint is a specific period of time to carry out work.
End-to-end testing is a methodology used to test whether the flow of an application is performing as designed from start to finish. This becomes essential as an application grows in scope and complexity and it becomes unfeasible to manually test for new features, catch bugs and notice regressions. These types of tests are also meant to capture bugs that come up during the integration between components that would not be caught during unit tests. For those unfamiliar with unit testing, it focuses on testing small individual “units” of source code.
Optimizing for performance can fall by the wayside when developing in a fast-paced environment such as the Informatics Innovation Unit (IIU). The IIU team strives to rapidly build out web application prototypes. Often, to get a prototype “into the hands” of our clients as quickly as possible, we are forced to adopt a “we’ll get to that later” philosophy. This issue came to the forefront when, out of curiosity, I tested our sites through Google’s PageSpeed Insights and was surprised to learn that, even though our sites ran well in our testing and production environments, our sites had page weights of more than 3mb and scored relatively poorly on their speed tests. This result was well over the average of 1.7mbs, which meant that for slower connections our sites would have a prolonged load time.
Luckily there were some fairly simple actions we could take to reduce page weight and improve site performance. I wanted to highlight a few of them here with focus on how to accomplish them when working with full stack JavaScript applications since that’s what we focus on in IIU…
EMCAScript 6 (ES6) is that latest version of JavaScript that was released in June 2015. I have been using and testing ES6 over the past few weeks. I feel that there are some great features that will improve the quality of life for developers who use simple scripts, as well as complex web applications. I wanted to highlight some of these features that would be useful for anyone developing with JavaScript.
Overview The following is an outline of the branching, merging, and workflow conventions that can help development teams manage parallel feature development and release management. This workflow style is taken directly from http://nvie.com/posts/asuccessful-gitbranchingmodel/ Please visit that site to read the full length post on the details of this method.
As part of the MMWR Express project, the team created a new web resource, “Photon Admin.” Photon Admin is a Javascript (JQuery) powered application-in-page built to tranform MMWR article blue-boxes into JSON ‘Blobs’ that can be easily consumed by the MMWR Express mobile application. The blobs generated by Photon Admin – affectionately referred to as “Blob The Builder” are then posted to a feed via CDC’s Content Syndication service (akin to a CDC hosted “feedburner” account) – where the information can then be consumed by MMWR Express.
