#xml-and-json

#xml-and-json

Events are essential inputs to modern front-end systems. But when we mistake reactions for architecture, complexity quietly multiplies. Over time, many front-end architectures have come to resemble chains of reactions rather than models of structure. The result is systems that are expressive, but increasingly difficult to reason about.

Modern web applications are no longer just "sites." They are long-lived, highly interactive systems that span multiple runtimes, global content delivery networks, edge caches, background workers, and increasingly complex data pipelines. They are expected to load instantly, remain responsive under poor network conditions, and degrade gracefully when something goes wrong.

Building APIs is so simple. Caveat, it's not. Actually, working with tools with no security, you've got a consumer and an API service, you can pretty much get that up and running on your laptop in two or three minutes with some modern frameworks. Then, authentication and authorization comes in. You need a way to model this.

The project behind this post is intentionally a bit over-engineered - in the "let's see what breaks when things grow" sense. That's by design. While a simple recipe example could easily be modelled with plain strings and numbers, cookbook explores more advanced, real-world concerns: extensibility, customisation, validation, and precise handling of numeric values, including floating-point quantities. The recipe domain is just a familiar, low-stakes vehicle for discussing these deeper ideas.

I was continueing my exploration of React server components when I stumbled upon on this article about progressive JSON. Dan Abramov describes a technique for streaming JSON from a server to a client in chunks, allowing the client to start rendering parts of the data before the entire payload has been received. This can significantly improve perceived performance, especially for large datasets.

This weekend I had some fun building a little Astro site for RSS aggregation. It works by the individual user defining a set of feeds they care about and works with a server-side Astro route to handle getting and parsing the feeds. Here's a quick example. On hitting the site, it notices you haven't defined any feeds and prompts you to do so:

React tutorial: Get started with the React libraryDespite the endless churn of new frameworks, React remains the quintessential reactive engine. This updated guide walks you through the fundamentals of React development, including a This is Spinal Tap variant on the canonical counter application. Sometimes, your components just need to go to 11.

Over the past decade, software development has undergone a massive transformation due to continuous innovations in tools, processors and novel architectures. In the past, most applications were monoliths and then shifted to microservices, and now we find ourselves embracing composability - a paradigm that prioritizes modular, reusable, and flexible software design. Instead of writing separate, tightly coupled applications, developers now compose software using reusable business capabilities that can be plugged into multiple projects. This enables greater scalability, maintainability, and collaboration across teams and organizations. At the heart of this movement is Bit Harmony, a framework designed to make composability a first-class citizen in modern web development.