Hey everyone! Azure costs are going through the roof right now, so I will be slowly migrating the entire site to WordPress.com over the next few days.
Expect some missing information and/or broken posts. More than happy to receive feedback on anything that is broken!
Inspecting file metadata is something we could easily do with just good ol’ browser JavaScript. But also creates a chance to explore the world of fullstack development as a nice and easy to implement application.
We are going to be coding a fullstack application (frontend + backend) that will let the user upload a file and let us visualize relevant file metadata such as file type or size.
We’ll be serving both the front-end assets and API on the same Express based Node.js server, with some ECMAScript 2015 flavour added to it with Babel.
The client application code is up to you. I’m going to go bare-minimum here, but feel free to use a front-end framework if you want to go all out.
Finally, we’ll deploy the application to Heroku. If you want a quick guide to deploying to Heroku, take a look at this post.
Today, we are going to be building an image search abstraction layer that is built on top of the Bing search API. For this purpose, we’ll make use of Node.js + Express and Mongoose as an object manager for MongoDB. Additionally, we’ll harness the power of ECMAScript 6 using Babel.
If you are not familiar with Mongoose, take a look at this recent post. If you want to know more about ECMAScript 6 usage in Node.js with Babel, give this other article a read first.
URL shorteners are very useful. Remembering long and tedious URL addresses, or sharing 100 character URLs with your peers is not what we would call, convenient. That’s why we have services such as the Google URL Shortener, Bitly or TinyURL.
We are going to replicate the functionality that these pages offer to some extent. We’ll start off by creating an API using Node.js and the Express framework, and will integrate with a MongoDB instance to store information making use of Mongoose.
The functionality is quite straightforward, we must implement two endpoints in our application:
Instead of babbling around, let’s set up the project and install all of our dependencies.
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. - Martin Golding
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