AppSignal's Node.js package now offers out-of-the-box support for the AMQPlib package, enabling monitoring of inbound and outbound messages from popular Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) brokers like RabbitMQ. In this article, we'll show you how to set up and use AppSignal to monitor your AMQP broker's performance.

If you have programmed with Phoenix, you already know what a delight it can be to work with LiveView. LiveView simplifies your development process by moving all state management to the server. This reduces the complexity of coordinating states between the client and server. LiveState aims to extend a LiveView-like development flow to embeddable web apps. But before we delve deeper into LiveState, let’s first understand what embeddable web apps are.

Unit tests are essential to verify the behavior of small code units in a Node.js application. This leads to clearer design, fewer bugs, and better adherence to business requirements. That's why Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) have become so popular in the backend development community. In this tutorial, we'll dive into unit testing and understand why it's needed in your backend.

It's 2024, and the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is 35 years old. The fact that the vast majority of web traffic still relies on this simple, stateless form of communication is a marvel in itself. A first set of content retrieval optimizations were added to the protocol when v1.0 was published in 1996. These include the infamous caching instructions (aka headers) that the client and server use to negotiate whether content needs refreshing.

Welcome back to our exploration of Node.js' built-in test runner! In the previous article, we laid the groundwork for writing and running basic tests in your projects by exploring a few simple examples. In this installment, we'll dive into practical examples of how to use mocking, code coverage analysis, test hooks, and strategies for testing HTTP servers. These tools will help you write more comprehensive and reliable tests, ultimately leading to more robust Node.js applications. Let's get started!

A predictable, stable environment (in terms of your operating system, system libraries, build tools, and programming libraries) is essential to each development step: from onboarding, to collaboration, continuous integration, quality assurance, and deployment. Deviation can cause one-off, intermittent, and even catastrophic failures. However, consistency can be elusive, even with the best intentions, best practices, and tools in place, because: Nix aims to solve some of these issues.

Ruby on Rails is currently in major version 7.1 and rolling towards Rails 8, the next comprehensive new release. Before Rails 8, though, there’s a significant version that will help bridge the gap: Ruby on Rails 7.2. In this post, we’ll dive into several noteworthy changes in Ruby on Rails 7.2, focusing on the support for database changes in Active Record. You'll come away with hands-on opportunities to work with these features. Let's get started!

DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service provided by AWS. It is highly available, scalable, and a great fit for applications that need to handle large amounts of data with low latency. DynamoDB is a key-value document database, meaning that it is schema-less and can store any kind of data. It is also a serverless service, so you don’t have to worry about managing and scaling servers. In this take, we will model data in DynamoDB using TypeScript.

Do you write Elixir but sometimes miss the benefits of type safety we have in other languages? If the answer is "yes", you may want to take a look at Gleam. It is a relatively young language that runs on top of the BEAM platform, which means it can be added as an enhancement to an Elixir codebase without you having to rewrite everything. In this article, we will add Gleam code to an Elixir project.

The inclusion of a stable test runner in Node.js(version 18+) has generated significant debate in the community, given the abundance of established third-party testing frameworks. While its arrival naturally sparks comparisons to existing tools, this article won't focus on justifying its place in the ecosystem. Instead, we'll embark on a hands-on exploration of the test runner's core capabilities, from writing and executing tests to organization and customization features.