web Archives - Ben Farrell

Untold stories of web-dev-server

user · November 23, 2020

It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post. And even then it was a constant barrage of Web Components posts from me, leading up to a book I published with Manning called Web Components in Action. It’s all because I believed in Web Components, but until recently (right around the time my book …

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The Slow March of Web Component Progress

user · September 24, 2017October 6, 2018

Almost two years ago, I made a hefty series of posts on the promise of Web Components. Things have changed and promises were broken, but on the whole, I don’t think MUCH has changed from an implementation perspective. These days, I’ve been sucked into the awesome world of the 3D web and WebVR and soon …

A-Bad attitude about A-Frame (I was wrong)

user · July 14, 2017April 14, 2018

I haven’t written many posts lately, especially tech related. The reason why is that I’ve been chasing the mixed reality train and learning. 3D development in general has had a number of false starts with me, and I never went in the deep end until now. This past year or so, I’ve been using both …

Progressive Web Apps

user · February 26, 2016April 14, 2018

Last Friday, the SFHTML5 Meetup group met to discuss something called “Progressive Web Apps.” I had some preconceived notions that the topic would be pretty cool, but actually, it got me more excited about the state of mobile/web/desktop in 2016 than I could have imagined. This might sound a bit dramatic, especially given the negative tone that …

ES6 Web Components Part 5 – Wrap-Up

user · October 26, 2015April 14, 2018

In Part 4 of my 5-part write-up, Project Setup and Opinions, I talked about lessons I took away from experimenting with ES6 Web Components. Lastly, is my wrap-up post… This was a monster write-up! In my four previous parts, I’ve shown you the basics on Web Components, what features make up a Web Component, how ES6 …

ES6 Web Components Part 4 – Project Setup and Opinions

user · October 26, 2015April 14, 2018

This article continues my ES6 Web Components series. The last article was the third in the series: Making an ES6 Component Class. So far, the basics have been pretty….basic. I hope I’ve given some ideas on how to create ES6 Web Components – but these basics only go so far. I do have some opinions …

ES6 Web Components Part 3 – Making an ES6 Component Class

user · October 26, 2015April 14, 2018

One thing I didn’t cover in my last post (#2 in the series) about all the pieces that bring Web Components together is actually using ES6! It’s not a feature of Web Components, but its some seriously nice glue that lets you tie your Web Component structure together. To be honest, I’m not using it …

ES6 Web Components Part 1 – A Man Without a Framework

user · October 26, 2015April 14, 2018

Before I launch into this 5-part series of posts, I just want to give a high-level overview of it: I wrote a lot. Partially because I’m long overdue on a blog post on all the stuff I’ve been experimenting with for the past several months, but mostly because much of the web tech I’ve been …

Managing your Polymer Project with Git, Bower, and Yeoman

user · July 22, 2014

I’ve been working more and more with Polymer lately and trying to establish some workflows that make sense. For those that aren’t familiar with Polymer, it’s essentially a set of polyfills that enable you to work with those fancy things called Web Components even though browsers don’t generally support them yet. All the Javascript frameworks/tools/libraries …

It’s the Open Sourced SharkAttack, yeah!

user · October 14, 2013

I’ve been working on my project called “SharkAttack” for awhile. It started out as a simple little Adobe AIR app to download new music from RSS feeds. Soon after, I rewrote the whole thing as a service with Node.js. And then, just lately I rewrote some of THAT to use Grunt.js. Anyway, the aim of …