Using Postman to Test APIs
By Couragyn Chretien
December 16, 2021
Postman is an easy-to-use tool that facilitates testing APIs. The GUI avoids the pain of old-school command-line tools and other time-consuming practices. Postman is helpful during development, for collaborating, and integral in automated testing.
It’s one of the most popular and longest-running API tools out there, so there’s a lot of documentation and community forums to provide whatever assistance is needed.
Use in development
The days of only manually testing APIs with curl are gone.
Instead we can use Postman to create reusable API calls. Postman will remember information such as the header configuration and data contained in the body. The API call can be sent from the GUI client, and it will display the response in a human-readable format.
Saved requests can be grouped in Collections. These can be imported and exported for collaborative use in a team.
Automated Testing
Full API testing can be done with the click of a button. Investing time now into building up the Postman infastructure will save development time down the line.
Custom Test Suites can be written in JavaScript and run manually or by a script. Periodically running these will ensure your …
testing api json
Installing Git 2 on CentOS 7
By Jon Jensen
December 9, 2021
Git-ing a bit stale?
RHEL/CentOS 7 is starting to feel a somewhat dated, but it still has over 2½ years before it reaches the end of its support lifetime that Red Hat has set for the end of June 2024.
One component that is far enough outdated to cause serious annoyance is Git.
Git is by far the most-used version control system in the world. It popularized the distributed model of tracking changes to source code files and greatly simplified collaboration by multiple developers. It is open source and free software and is used by most public and many internal software projects, and also by solo developers. IDEs such as VS Code and IntelliJ idea integrate with it. SaaS code hosting providers GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and others are built around it. We have been using and advocating Git since 2007 — see our blog posts about Git for a variety of helpful articles.
CentOS/RHEL 7 includes Git version 1.8.3, which was released in May 2013. There have been 2 major, 36 minor, and 216 patch releases of Git in the 8½ years between then and the current version 2.34.1!
The makers of CentOS/RHEL have good reasons to stick with versions they shipped with for the lifetime of the operating system: …
git sysadmin linux
Building responsive websites with Tailwind CSS
By Afif Sohaili
December 3, 2021
Tailwind CSS is a CSS framework, like Bootstrap, Bulma, and Foundation. However, Tailwind does things in a less conventional way when compared to traditional CSS frameworks. Instead of providing CSS classes based on components or functional roles (e.g. .card or .row), Tailwind only provides utility classes, in which each class does only one specific thing a CSS attribute usually does, such as m-4 for margin: 1rem or mt-8 for margin-top: 2rem.
In Bootstrap, one can simply apply the provided .card CSS class to have a <div> styled like a card the Bootstrap way. In Tailwind, the styles have to be constructed with a string of different atomic classes. E.g. the equivalent of a Bootstrap’s .card would be something like relative flex flex-col break-words bg-white bg-clip-border min-w-0 rounded border. Verbose, yes, but this gives flexibility for the developers to define the appearance of a .card element themselves (e.g. there could be multiple variants of appearances of a .card) without having to worry about overriding inherited/cascading CSS classes, which are typically the cause of many CSS bugs in production.
Atomic CSS
The first thing most notice when developing with …
css tailwindcss design
Building a search suggestions feature with Node.js and Vue
By Greg Davidson
November 27, 2021
Photo by Kasper Rasmussen on Unsplash
The backstory
Some time ago, I worked on a project to improve the usability of a search component for our clients. Similar to Google and other search interfaces, the user was presented with a number of suggested search terms as they typed into the search box. We wanted to add keyboard support and give the component a visual facelift. When the customer used the up, down, Esc, or Enter or Return keys, the component would allow them to choose a particular search term, clear their search, or navigate to the results for their chosen search term.
This is what the new and improved UI looked like:
As developers, it can sometimes feel like we’re stuck when working on older, well established projects. We gaze longingly at newer and shinier tools. Part of my objective while building this feature was to prove the viability of a newer approach (Node.js and Vue) to the other engineers on the project as well as the client.
The feature existed already but we wanted to improve the UX and performance. Having added several Vue-powered features to this site in the past, I was very comfortable with the idea and have written about that previously. It would …
nodejs vue javascript development
Salesforce data migration: promoting data changes from a sandbox to production
By Dylan Wooters
November 24, 2021
Photo by Dylan Wooters, 2021
Intro
End Point recently completed a new e-commerce website built using Nuxt, Node.js, and Algolia and backed by Salesforce data. As part of the project, the client also wanted to re-categorize their products. They had already updated the data in a Salesforce sandbox and needed a way to move their changes to production in conjunction with the launch of the new website.
This data migration initially seemed like a simple request, but it ended up being one of the more challenging parts of the project. While there are clear instructions on how to migrate code changes from a sandbox to production (via change sets), there is very little information on how to migrate data.
Here I will outline the solution we developed, which involved writing a custom migration script using the JSForce library, testing using additional sandboxes, and planning for a rollback. This can serve as a blueprint for developers faced with the same task.
Why not use Data Loader to migrate?
The Salesforce Data Loader is a clunky yet reliable application that allows you to load large amounts of data directly into a Salesforce org. It will work to migrate data if the requirements are not …
salesforce typescript migration
From Liquid Galaxy to VisionPort
By Alejandro Ramon
November 23, 2021
We are rebranding! Meet the future of Liquid Galaxy: VisionPort.
We are proud to announce the official launch of VisionPort, the next phase for Liquid Galaxy. We have spent the past six months taking steps to rebrand, expand, and reposition our product to combine modern working necessities with the traditional kiosk-style, shared immersive experience familiar to our clients. Through these efforts have come a robust product encompassing an entire room of enhanced features, screens, and conference-enabling applications.
While our core product will remain consistent with what our clients know and love, current and future clients can look forward to significant updates to the content management system and user experience. We are also proud to announce advanced add-on features that will allow our current and future clients to make their systems more collaborative, interactive, and adaptable to their needs.
Our core offerings include:
- Extensive preparation and customization of screens, servers, and frames
- Google Earth, Cesium, Street View, etc.
- Content Management System
- Ongoing support service
- Custom installation, system, and content consulting
- Comprehensive system and content training …
visionport company
Forwarding Google Forms responses to an external API
By Afif Sohaili
November 16, 2021
Google Forms is a great form service that many people use for surveys, research, questionnaires, etc. It has an intuitive and flexible interface for building forms and is fairly easy to use for everyone. Once you get a response, you can view the results in the admin section of the form or in a Google Sheets document in which Google will automatically insert all your responses.
However, you may need to do something else with the responses. For example, what if you want to have the response printed in your Slack channel or Discord server? Or what if you want to use the raw data to make more complex visualizations than Google Sheets is capable of?
Google Apps Script to the rescue!
Google Apps Script is a development platform for building add-ons for Google products, such as Google Sheets, Google Docs, and Google Forms. You write your JavaScript in the code editor that Google provides for you, so there is nothing to install on your local machine to start developing. This code then gets executed on Google’s servers. These Google Apps Script projects can then be published as a Google Workspace add-on that others can use or shared within your organization.
Even though Google Apps …
google-apps-script javascript integration google-forms
Liquid Galaxy Media Stream Integration
By Alejandro Ramon
November 11, 2021
End Point’s Immersive and Geospatial Division is proud to announce the rollout of our new Media Stream Integration as an extension to the Liquid Galaxy platform’s capabilities. This additional hardware can be added to existing installations or included in a new solution provided by our sales team.
The Media Stream Integration (“MSI”) is a collection of hardware additions to the Liquid Galaxy that allows a user to stream from any HDMI capable device in up to a 4k (3840×2160 pixels) window on the main displays of the system.
With the MSI, a user can connect and share any media source directly to the system through the touchscreen. Examples include a video game console, cable TV box, DVR device, laptop or desktop computer, Plex server, and more. In other words, users can showcase media content that may not be natively supported on the Liquid Galaxy platform.
How it works
A user simply ensures that the device is on, and it will appear as an option to share to the Liquid Galaxy screens on the touchscreen. The stream can be overlaid on top of existing content in pre-defined windows on the display wall through which the content will be displayed. When finished, the overlay window can be …
visionport