Turning coffee into some sort of API has probably been the dream of a lot of developers. In fact today marks the 20th birthday of the IETF RFC 2324 suggesting the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP). Last year, together with a friend, I hacked a coffee machine using JavaScript, but what do you do if you want to bring a bit more comfort to… Read More
Progressive Web Apps (or PWAs for short) aim to deliver a better and engaging user experience by applying progressive enhancements using modern web standards and best practices. These include among others service workers, push APIs, background sync and serving your page over HTTPS. If the app is loaded in browsers that doesn’t support a web standard, it should work just like a normal website. In modern browsers, however, the experience should be improved… Read More
Using Angular CLI is a popular way of creating Single Page Apps (SPA) with Angular. However, sometimes CLI is not an option for your project or you just want to have better control on what’s going on behind the scenes. Let’s take a look at how we can create an Angular project entirely from scratch. In this post we will: Set up a Node project Create an… Read More
At Twilio we often say, “We can’t wait to see what you build.” That’s because the communications building blocks we provide are only as powerful and innovative as the applications that developers create with them. It’s these builders who have shown us just how far our APIs can be taken, from 3D mapping with AR and IoT potty training, to a life-saving text line and data-driven debt relief. But… Read More
At the end of October a friend and I attended a hackathon at our university. It was there that we decided to build TextEverything, a plugin-driven SMS-based bot written using Node.js. We quickly realised the potential of TextEverything and we think it’s a really easy way to quickly build functional SMS bots. In this post you will learn how to write plugins for TextEverything to build… Read More
In other posts we have investigated how to capture screen output in Chrome and built a screen sharing video chat application. There was one feature missing though. The Chrome extension made screen capture possible, but didn’t test whether it had been installed before the application tried to use it. In this post we are going to build a Chrome extension that can be detected from the front… Read More
Web Components is a technology I’ve been excited about for years. The idea is that you can create your own UI components that are supported in the browser regardless of which framework you are using (or none at all for that matter). However, there wasn’t much traction around them until recently. The web components APIs are pretty low level by themselves but projects like Polymer are trying to… Read More
In recent posts we’ve seen how to capture a user’s screen in Chrome and Firefox. Now it’s time to combine this with a real video chat application and share screens as part of a video chat. What we’re building In this post we’ll take the Twilio Video quickstart application and add screen sharing to it. When we are done your application will let you make calls between browsers… Read More
One classic attack when working with web applications is Cross Site Request Forgery aka CSRF/XSRF (read C-Surf). They are used by attackers to perform requests on behalf of users in your application without them noticing. Let’s look at how they can pull this off and how we can protect our applications from these type of threat. Let’s talk theory Before we can prevent CSRF attacks we need to… Read More