Category: Node JS

React Native- iOS – Up and Running your first app

Nikita JajodiaLeave a comment

This is a brief post about getting started with React Native in iOS. I will walk you through the steps for running your first react native app in an iOS simulator. These steps are also present directly on react native’s official website. The reason of this post is that I will be using this post as a part of a guide that I am looking forward to make for developing an app from scratch. I shall put down all the obstacles I face with the solutions so that it makes it easier for you guys. Now let’s get started.

Development OS: macOS
Target OS: iOS

Step 1- Installing dependencies

Run the following commands in the terminal one after the other:

brew install node
npm install -g react-native-cli

Step 2- Installing XCode

The best way to install Xcode is via the Mac App Store. Once you install Xcode, it will also install the iOS Simulator and all the necessary tools to build your iOS app.

If you have already installed Xcode on your system, make sure it is version 8 or higher.

Step 3- Installing XCode command line tools

Once you are done installing XCode, open it and choose ‘Preferences’ from the XCode menu. Go to Locations and then from the Command Line tools dropdown, select the latest XCode version and install it.

Screen Shot 2018-07-15 at 8.38.08 PM

Step 4 – Creating a new Application

Let’s create an application called TestApp. In the terminal, navigate to the desired location and run the following command:

react-native init TestApp

The above command will create a new react native application for you named as TestApp.

Step 5 – Running your application

cd TestApp
react-native run-ios

 

This will load your iOS simulator shortly and will show the following default screen.

Screen Shot 2018-07-15 at 8.46.19 PM

That’s it. You are good to go, your first react-native iOS app is successfully running on a simulator now. Stay connected for more.

Component Folder Pattern in React JS

Nikita Jajodia1 Comment

Recently, while working with React I came across this scalable ‘Component’ folder structure and since then my app is well organised and looks un-cluttered. Let’s consider we have different components in our app as follows:

| – src/
++| – App.js
++| – SearchLoader.js
++| – SearchInput.js
++| – SearchError.js
++| – Button.js
++| – index.js
++| – TextField.js

The major problem I faced in the above directory structure is that as and when I kept adding components in my app, my src folder kept filling up. This created an issue when I had to find files related to a particular component. This gave me a hard time to find what I was looking for and cluttered my root folder. So I found the following approach which made it easy to organise my components.

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Simple Web Scraping using node.js, cheerio, and request.

Nikita JajodiaLeave a comment

Introduction

The basic definition of Web scraping would be ‘Web Data Extraction, it is a technique to extract large amounts of data from websites and the extracted data is usually stored on a local computer in different file formats.’ The purpose of such extraction might be consuming the data in any application, to analyze or study the extracted data for competitive purposes. I happen to engage myself in web scraping as I am working on an application where I had this requirement of fetching all my blog posts from both my WordPress sites. So I ended up with web scraping which suggested me that I can scrape data from any website and meet my requirements. This is a very brief article to let your hands on web scraping. At the end of this tutorial, you should be able to go ahead and scrape/ extract data from any website.

Here, I will be scraping the home page of both my WordPress sites and extract metadata such as the post title and post URL.

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Quick guidance to build a Node.js API

Nikita JajodiaLeave a comment

Node.js seems a bit frightening to beginners, but it is not complicated at all. Here is a small tutorial which will help you to build your own node.js API within a fraction of an hour. This is a very quick and simple guide to Node.js, express framework and MongoDB.

You can access the entire code on GithHub.

Before you start building your API, you should know the basics of JavaScript, CRUD operations and REST APIs. Here you will be creating an API for a simple todo application where you will perform CRUD operations like create, read, update and delete on your todos.Read More »