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Serverless and WebSockets is a bit of a contradiction. Serverless implies that we’re not managing servers ourselves, they’ve been abstracted away for our convenience. WebSockets allow us to communicate between a “client” and a “server”, but what happens when that server is “serverless”?! By Jo Franchetti.

WebSockets enable a connection between a browser and a web server which stays open, unlike alternatives like HTTP polling. This persistent connection means that data can be transferred as it happens, in realtime.

You will get walkthrough:

• What does serverless mean, actually?
• What are WebSockets, actually?
• Why are people confused by the idea of serverless WebSockets?
• Serverless WebSockets with Ably
• Getting Started with Ably and Netlify
• Adding Ably to your existing Netlify apps

It is often joked that serverless is just “somebody else’s server”. This is the premise of serverless. It is someone else’s server, and also their maintenance, patching and provisioning cycle, operations, capacity planning and engineering. Good read!

Over the past year developers removed Angular’s legacy compiler and rendering pipeline which enabled the development of a series of developer experience improvements in the past couple of months. Angular v15 is the culmination of this with dozens of refinements which lead to better developer experience and performance. By Minko Gechev.

Article captures the details of the latest changes:

• Standalone APIs are now our of developer preview!
• Router and HttpClient tree-shakable standalone APIs
• Directive composition API
• Image directive is now stable!
• Functional router guards
• Router unwraps default imports
• Better stack traces
• Release MDC-based components to stable
• More improvements in components
• Automatic imports in language service

… and more. The launch of Ivy in 2020 enabled a lot of improvements across the board that you can find already rolling out. Optional NgModules is a great example. It helps with reduction of the concepts beginners need to deal with as part of their critical learning journey and also supports advanced features such as directive composition API via standalone directives. Nice one!

Domain name abuse is one of the most dangerous and under-regulated issues in digital business security today. An attack on a web domain can lead to the redirection of a company’s website, domain spoofing, phishing attacks, network breaches, and business email compromise (BEC). By cscdbs.com.

Seemingly every day, we learn about new developments involving supply chain attacks, ransomware, and phishing attacks, along with additional layers of complexity in terms of what coverage they require and how to stop them. The article then discusses:

• Many of the largest companies in the world still lack basic domain security protocols
• You’re only as secure as your vendors, and you can choose your domain registrar
• Not monitoring and taking down fraudulent lookalike domains impersonating your brand will increase your chances of attacks

The intent of these fake and maliciously registered domains is to leverage the trust placed on the targeted brands to launch phishing attacks, other forms of digital brand abuse, or IP infringement. This often leads to revenue loss, traffic diversion, and a diminished brand reputation. There are endless domain spoofing tactics and permutations that can be used by phishers and malicious third parties. Good read!

Author recently spoke with some industry experts about three technologies they predict will be the Next Big Things. One of the 3 in particular deserves a more detailed look: WebAssembly (often abbreviated as Wasm). Wasm has caught the interest of many because it extends the language support for browsers beyond JavaScript. By Dave McAllister of F5.

No, it’s not a replacement for JavaScript; rather, it’s the fourth and newest language accepted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as an official web standard (along with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).

Back in 2015, Mozilla started work on a new standard to define a “a portable, size‑ and load-time-efficient format and execution model” as a compilation target for web browsers. WebAssembly basically was designed to allow languages other than JavaScript to run within the browser. And Wasm quickly caught on with browser vendors, with all the major browsers supporting it.

Why should you care about WebAssembly?

• Speed/performance
• Size
• Cross‑platform
• Multi‑lingual
• Security

If you have to run untrusted code in your browser, it must be isolated. Wasm achieves isolation with memory‑safe sandboxed execution environments. The current implementation isn’t perfect, but Wasm contributors are heavily focused on it, so I expect rapid improvement. You will get links to further reading, youtube video and resources to get you started with Wasm. Good read!

If you’re like me, you really appreciate a test automation step as part of your pull request (PR) CI for that added confidence before merging code. I want to show you how to add Playwright tests to your PRs and how to tie it all together with a GitHub Actions CI workflow. By Liran Tal.

import { test, expect } from '@playwright/test';

test('page should have title of "Dogs security blog"', async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto('http://localhost:3000/');
  const title = await page.title();
  expect(title).toBe("Dogs security blog");
});

If you’ve never come across Playwright before, the Playwright test automation framework has had its first release in 2017, but has recently grown in popularity as another one of Microsoft’s developer tooling (in addition to Visual Studio Code and others). The Playwright test automation framework is a great way to easily write end-to-end (E2E) tests and also target cross-browser compatibility. I’ve used both Selenium and Cypress in the past, and if you’ve had any similar experience, then Playwright will surely remind you of the latter. It’s easy to get started, easy to write tests, and has built-in measures to ensure tests aren’t flaky.

In this article you will learn:

• The basics of how to write end-to-end tests with Playwright
• How to run Playwright tests in your GitHub Actions CI
• How to run Playwright tests for your deployed Netlify preview URLs
• How to preserve Playwright debug traces and make them available as build artifacts in GitHub Actions CI

Unlike Cypress, another test automation tool, which injects itself as a library to the web page DOM as its primary architecture to control the browser, Playwright uses native browser APIs to control the automation. Very interesting!

Scala Toolkit is an ongoing effort by Scala Center and VirtusLab to compose a set of approachable libraries to solve everyday problems. These libraries will be made easily accessible as a precomposed package. This package will be available for each Scala release. By Szymon Rodziewicz.

We constructed the main measures from our adjusted variation of the Cognitive Dimensions Framework, where we looked at the cognitive cost and time required in interactions with the library. Alongside that, we measured a set of practical aspects of each library, including tests, responsiveness and availability of the maintainers; documentation; popularity; dependencies; dependencies stability; small size; API stability; versioning schema; and cross-platform support.

Note that Scala Toolkit does not intend to create libraries of its own. The goal is to work with the maintainers of existing, battle-tested libraries. Neither will we promote these libraries as universal solutions. We plan to allow users to use them easily while acknowledging that other libraries will be better suited in certain situations.

All libraries featured in the Toolkit will arrive with carefully prepared knowledge bases featuring well-structured practical information. In addition, all libraries will be available in one place, allowing the developers to find solutions and example snippets to solve their problems quickly. Nice one!

Older article will guide you through how to use scikit-learn, pickle, Flask, Microsoft Azure and ipywidgets to fully deploy a Python machine learning algorithm into a live, production environment. By Graham Harrison.

You will get these steps describing how machine learning algorithm could be fully deployed into a live production environment so that it could be “consumed” in a platform-agnostic way:

• Develop a machine learning algorithm
• Make an individual prediction from the trained model
• Develop a web service wrapper
• Deploy the web service to microsoft Azure
• Add the Azure app service extension to VS Code
• Building a client application to consume the Azure deployed web service

There are quite a few steps involved, but using readily available libraries and free tools including scikit-learn, pickle, flask, Microsoft Azure and ipywidgets we have constructed a fully working, publicly available cloud deployment of a machine learning algorithm and a fully functioning client to call and consume the web service and display the results. Nice one!

Native MQTT eliminates the need to write custom code, orchestrate additional technology layers or incorporate additional hosting services. By By Jason Myers.

MQTT is a powerhouse within the Internet of Things (IoT) space. Its pub/sub model and lack of defined payload structure make it infinitely adaptable to the needs of modern sensors, devices and systems. IoT data is also time-series data. Time-stamped data enables businesses and applications to track real-time and historical change, and it can also contribute to forecasting and prediction.

Article then describes:

• Configuring Native MQTT
  • Broker details: Specify the IP address, port and authentication parameters for your MQTT message broker
  • Topic name: Provide the name(s) for the topic(s) you want to subscribe to
  • Parsing rules: Set up parsing rules to map elements in your MQTT messages to the different elements of InfluxDB’s line protocol data model: measurements, timestamps, fields, and tags
• Data parsing options

Native MQTT gives developers a way to collect time-series data in the cloud with a single step. Eliminating the need to write custom code, orchestrate additional technology layers or incorporate additional hosting services means that developers can spend more time actually using their collected data and less time configuring or managing infrastructure. Good read!

Redirects send users from one URL to another. The first URL is the one the user clicked, typed in, or otherwise requested. The second is the new destination URL. By Kelly Lyons, senior blog editor @ Semrush.

Redirections work pretty much the same way for search engines. They send search engines from one particular URL to another.

You will get thorough explanation of:

• What are redirects?
• Why are redirects important?
• When to use redirects
• Types of redirects
• HTTP redirects
• Meta refresh redirects
• JavaScript redirects
• How to implement redirects
• 5 redirect best practices

When you set up a redirect, make sure that the new page’s content is a close match to the old page’s. For example, redirecting an expired specials page to your main specials page instead of your homepage makes a lot more sense. Google essentially skips over true 404 pages. This doesn’t happen with soft 404 errors, so it’s best to avoid them and fix any existing errors. Long and informative article!

Browser automation describes the process of programmatically performing certain actions in the browser (or handing these actions over to robots) that might otherwise be quite tedious or repetitive to be performed manually by a human. By Jude Ero.

Watir, pronounced as water, is a group of Ruby libraries for automated web browsers. It allows writing the tests which are easy to read and maintain. In other words, it is a simple and flexible tool.

In the artcile also:

• What is browser automation?
• Implementing Watir
• Installing gems
• Setting up Watir
• Launching a browser
• Finding and interacting with elements
• Extracting data from the web page
• Executing javascript

Watir is a family of libraries for web browser testing and automation. It is highly regarded in the Ruby community and easy to learn and use. In this tutorial, you learned how to set it up and harness its most common functionalities. Interesting!