These days it seems like all programming is about creating web-apps!

For a long time, I sort of resisted this tend, and I tended to think of user-interface-related work as “beneath” me; I was more interested in lower-level type programming for sure.

Recently, however, I started to study how modern web browsers work, and I am starting to be able to really appreciate how amazing they are from a technical standpoint. (Not to mention the fact that they’ve changed the world by rendering the WWW for us!)

As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, I would probably rank Operating Systems, Compilers, and Web-Browsers as the “big three” of computer science’s most amazing creations.

Additionally, I have started to adopt an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” type of attitude towards web-development; I have decided I am going to learn how to do some web-related programming!

Just for fun, I am going to work on developing some simple web-apps using various languages and frame-works, and am going to document the process of how I like the tooling of each.

Additionally, I am going to start from absolute scratch, initially trying to do everything by hand w/o using any frameworks or fancy tools at all, so that I have a “bottom-up” understanding of the process. (One thing I don’t like doing is to work with tools before you really understand the problem they are trying to solve.)

So without further ado, here follows a list of stuff I’ve written so far; I will continue to add to this on an on-going basis.

Chrome Extension

Simple chrome extension that I developed to get my feet wet.

See the blog post about it here.

WikiCompare

This was my first attempt at web-app; it is a straight up .HTML and hand-crafted .JS type “app” that is about as simple and as plain as it gets:

https://kundalinisoftware.com/io/wikicompare.html

The blog post describing its construction can be seen here.

Consuming a Google App Engine Hosted Python(Flask)-based Micro-service from a TamperMonkey-Hosted Javascript function

I created a simple TamperMonkey script that injects some HTML into Wikipedia pages to provide a link to the corresponding simple.wikipedia article. The script also hits a small Flask-based micro-service I developed which returns JSON indicating if the article exists, and also uses the logic developed in WikiCompare above to compare two articles.

Checkout the post about it here, which also documents how I deployed the micro-service to the Google App Engine.