Tag: javascript

Developing Your Applications More Efficiently with MongoDB Atlas Serverless Instances

October 21, 2022 Nic Raboy

If you're a developer, worrying about your database is not necessarily something you want to do. You likely don't want to spend your time provisioning or sizing clusters as the demand of your application changes. You probably also don't want to worry about breaking the bank if you've scaled something incorrectly.

With MongoDB Atlas, you have a few deployment options to choose from when it comes to your database. While you could choose a pre-provisioned shared or dedicated cluster, you're still stuck having to size and estimate the database resources you will need and subsequently managing your cluster capacity to best fit demand. While a pre-provisioned cluster isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it might not make sense if your development becomes idle or you’re expecting frequent periods of growth or decline. Instead, you can opt for a serverless instance to help remove the capacity management burden and free up time to dedicate to writing code. Serverless instances provide an on-demand database endpoint for your application that will automatically scale up and down to zero with application demand and only charge you based on your usage.

In this short and sweet tutorial, we'll see how easy it is to get started with a MongoDB Atlas serverless instance and how to begin to develop an application against it.

Randomizing MongoDB Document Fields on a Repeating Timer with Node.js

August 12, 2022 Nic Raboy

About a year ago I created a game with MongoDB and Unity and wrote about it in a previous tutorial. The idea was to demonstrate how features within the game could be synchronized to each player in near real-time. At the time, synchronization happened through a web dashboard where the player could select features to sync and they would then sync to the game client, wherever in the world it might be.

Recently, the game was adopted to be a demo at several conferences. The problem was that switching between the game and the web dashboard to demonstrate features being synchronized was a hassle. As a result, I decided to write a script that did this automatically on a timer.

In this quick tutorial, we're going to see how to update documents within MongoDB on a timer, something that might be useful to you for demos and other potential use-cases.

Developing a Web Application with Netlify Serverless Functions and MongoDB

June 28, 2022 Nic Raboy

As I mentioned in a previous tutorial, I'm a big fan of Netlify and the services they offer developers—my favorite of their services being their static website hosting and serverless functions. When combining the two, you can deploy a complex website or web application with a back end, without ever worrying about infrastructure or potentially complex API design.

So how does that work with a database like MongoDB?

If you've ever dabbled with serverless functions before, you might be aware that they are not always available for consumption. Many serverless functions exist for a defined amount of time and then are shut down until they are executed again. With this in mind, the connection to a database might not always be available like it would be in an application built with Express Framework, for example. You could establish a connection every time a function is called, but then you risk too many connections, which might overload your database.

So what do you do?

In this tutorial, we're going to see how to build and deploy a simple web application using Netlify Functions and MongoDB Atlas. For this particular tutorial, we'll be using the Node.js driver for MongoDB, but both Netlify and MongoDB support the use of other languages and drivers as well.

Add a Comments Section to an Eleventy Website with MongoDB and Netlify

March 23, 2022 Nic Raboy

I'm a huge fan of static generated websites! From a personal level, I have The Polyglot Developer, Poké Trainer Nic, and The Tracy Developer Meetup, all three of which are static generated websites built with either Hugo or Eleventy. In addition to being static generated, all three are hosted on Netlify.

I didn't start with a static generator though. I started on WordPress, so when I made the switch to static HTML, I got a lot of benefits, but I ended up with one big loss. The comments of my site, which were once stored in a database and loaded on-demand, didn't have a home.

Fast forward to now, we have options!

In this tutorial, we're going to look at maintaining a static generated website on Netlify with Eleventy, but the big thing here is that we're going to see how to have comments for each of our blog pages.

Add Pagination to Your Eleventy Static Generated Website in Minutes

January 19, 2022 Nic Raboy

A few months ago you might remember a tutorial I put out regarding remote caching in Eleventy. In this tutorial titled, Download and Cache YouTube Data in an Eleventy Website with Simple JavaScript, I demonstrated how I was automatically gathering YouTube videos from a playlist on my Poké Trainer Nic channel and publishing them to my Eleventy website.

At the time, this was the best thing since sliced bread for that particular website. Fast forward to now and we've got a problem with too many videos loading all at once with a ten hour scroll to reach the bottom. The scroll time is an over exaggeration, but you get the idea that too much content on a single page can become a problem.

This lead me to pagination and showing only a small subset of videos per page.

We're going to see how to very quickly add pagination to an Eleventy website, something that can be accomplished with a few lines of HTML and a few minutes of your time.

Create a Custom Stream Elements Overlay for YouTube Subscribers

January 12, 2022 Nic Raboy

I recently got into streaming video games on a consistent basis and needed a better call to action (CTA) to encourage subscribers. In an attempt to encourage more subscriptions, I thought it'd be beneficial to show to my viewers how many current subscriptions I had and have them watch the number increase if they choose to subscribe.

While I could just show static plain text of this, I thought it'd be more professional to have it nicely formatted and updating live. For this I stumbled upon Stream Elements.

With Stream Elements I could create web overlays to show on my stream. However, I was responsible with the design of these overlays.

In this tutorial, I'm going to share how I created a custom widget for showing total YouTube subscribers on my stream.

Implement Full-Text Search over a GraphQL API in MongoDB Atlas

December 16, 2021 Nic Raboy

GraphQL can be an extremely powerful and efficient way to create APIs and MongoDB Realm makes it easy by allowing you to connect your collections to GraphQL schemas without writing a single line of code. I wrote about some of the basics behind configuring MongoDB and Realm for GraphQL in an announcement tutorial a while back.

As you find yourself needing to do more advanced things with GraphQL, you're going to need to familiarize yourself with custom resolvers. If you can't map collection fields to a schema from within Realm and you need to write custom logic using a serverless function instead, this is where the custom resolvers come into play. Take the example of needing to use an aggregation pipeline within MongoDB. The complex logic that you add to your aggregation pipeline isn't something you can map. The good news is that you don't need to abandon MongoDB Realm for these scenarios, but you can leverage Realm's custom resolvers instead.

In this tutorial we're going to see how to create a custom resolver that implements Atlas Search for our GraphQL API using Realm Functions, enabling you to add fast, relevant full-text search to your applications.