Nicolas Fränkel

I’m coming relatively late to the LLM party, but I rarely come very early in the hype cycle. For example, I never bought into blockchain, the solution still searching for problems to solve, nor in microservices, the latest in the cargo cult IT trends. Despite my late arrival at the LLM party, I have been a regular user of LLMs. I use OpenAI for non-controversial questions outside my cone of knowledge, e.g., linguistics or legal; I use GitHub Copilot in my IDE to improve my code. Th

The book was sent to me by Michael Simons. He asked for my feedback: I changed my reading schedule, took a few months, and here it is. Facts 10 chapters288 pages$33.59 (eBook) Note that MotherDuck, a company providing an online service that builds upon DuckDB, offers a free PDF copy. Chapters An introduction to DuckDBGetting started with DuckDBExecuting SQL queriesAdvanced aggregation and analysis of dataExploring data without persistenceIntegrating with the Python ecosystemDuckDB in the

In previous weeks, I’ve analyzed several libraries and frameworks that augment the client with AJAX capabilities. Vue.jsAlpine.jsHTMXVaadin In this post, I’ll compare them across several axes. Analysis Frontend skills Remember that I started this series from the point of view of a backend developer. In this section, I grade how much you need to know about client technologies to complete the job. Team organization In the introduction, I hinted that the decoupling of frontend

I’ve written a lot about Vaadin. I was so enthusiastic that I wrote the first book about it (besides the Book of Vaadin), its updated edition for Vaadin 7, and a companion website. Still, I’m amazed that so many people in the JVM world never heard of it. In this post, I’d like to introduce Vaadin in the context of AJAX and SSR. Short introduction to Vaadin The beauty of Vaadin lies in its simplicity - you only write backend code. You read that well. A Vaadin developer only

This post is part of a series comparing different ways to implement asynchronous requests on the client to augment the latter. So far, I described the process with Vue.js and Alpine.js. Both are similar from the developers' point of view: they involve JavaScript. In this post, I’ll focus on HTMX, whose approach is quite different. Laying out the work I’ll follow the same structure as in the previous posts of the series. Here’s the setup, server- and client-side. Server-s

This post is part of a series comparing different ways to implement asynchronous requests on the client, which is colloquially known as AJAX. I dedicated the previous post to Vue.js; I’ll dedicate this one to Alpine.js - not to be confused with Alpine Linux. I’ll follow the same structure as previously. Laying out the work Here’s the setup, server- and client-side. Server-side Here is how I integrate Thymeleaf and Alpine.js in the POM: pom.xml <dependencies>

In my previous post, I laid the ground to build upon; now is the time to start 'for real'. I heard a lot of Vue.js. Additionally, a friend who transitioned from developer to manager told me good things about Vue, which further piqued my interest. I decided to have a look at it: it will be the first 'lightweight' JavaScript framework I’ll study - from the point of view of a newbie, which I am. Laying out the work I explained WebJars and Thymeleaf in the last post. Here’s the setu

Understanding the shared steps in the project setup is crucial before delving into the specifics of each client-augmenting technology. My requirements from the last post where quite straightforward: I’ll assume the viewpoint of a backend developerNo front-end build step: no TypeScript, no minification, etc.All dependencies are managed from the backend app, i.e., Maven It’s important to note that the technology I’ll be detailing, except Vaadin, follows a similar approach. V

My journey in programming began over two decades ago, a time when JavaScript was a far cry from its current state, and developers were primarily focused on Microsoft Internet Explorer. One of my proudest achievements back then was writing a few lines of code that allowed users to add and remove table rows entirely on the client side. We called it DHTML. Many developers today have forgotten about it—or never knew it existed. A few years later, AJAX emerged, revolutionizing the way we approached