Table of contents for Jul/Aug 2023 in CODE Magazine

EDITORIAL Evoking the theme of this issue, I started this editorial using ChatGPT. The prompt I fed it was: “Write an editorial in the style of Rod Paddock editor-in-chief of CODE Magazine. Discuss how containerized apps and microservices are not for every developer.” The prompt I sent into ChatGPT generated a full editorial with an introduction that starts like this: Containerized Apps and Microservices: Not a One-Size-Fits-All Solution In the ever-evolving world of software development, containerized apps and microservices have garnered significant attention as modern solutions to streamline application deployment and scalability. The allure of these technologies is undeniable, but it is crucial to recognize that they are not the panacea for every development project. As Editor-in-Chief of CODE Magazine, I feel compelled to shed light on the potential pitfalls…

#We're living through interesting times. It's estimated that the human brain holds 2.5 petabytes of memory. Google Bard was trained in a dataset of around 1.56 petabytes. Yeah, we humans are still ahead, but consider that Bard took four months to learn all that, and Bard is far better than a human in making interconnections in so many ways. I use Bard as an example, but ChatGPT's numbers are similar. Did you know that, since 2011, computer vision has been better than human vision in recognizing objects? Pair that with the ability of modern cameras and ultrasonic sensors to see in thick fog, across occlusions, in pouring down rain, and in ultraviolet and infrared spectrums. Can these technologies not one day help us to drive? After all, how do airplanes…

CODA The inspiration for this month's column is Robert Frost's 1915 same-named poem. The poem's text may be found here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken, as well as a reading guide here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/89511/robert-frost-the-road-not-taken. Already, you may be thinking that on the title alone, this month's column is serious. but the poem was anything but. As the associated guide explains, Frost liked to say that “I'm never more serious than when joking.” That statement can be taken multiple ways. Generally, Frost's statement requires us to confront the fact that some ways may conflict with each other, and both can still be true. We might choose only one way despite wishing we could easily avail ourselves of both choices, even for only a brief time. It's the stuff that makes decision-making so difficult. Let's dig into…

I've already seen ChatGPT being used as a marketing tool and as an editorial tool, creating abstracts, looking for plagiarism, and helping with SEO. AI technology has been around as a writing platform to help with imposing style guide, grammar, and spelling rules for a few years (Writer.com, Acrolinx, Grammarly, etc.). I don't think the technology in its current form is headed toward eliminating the need for editors simply because the tool doesn't get it entirely right, especially when it comes to idioms and metaphorical expressions or analogies, and even for basic things like word or character count limitations. It's not even close. It's not ready yet to eliminate the need for writers either, but I can imagine that as a possibility coming soon. I feel sad that people might…

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past couple of months, you've heard of the chatbot called ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and released in November 2022. Since then, it's taken the world by storm. Not a day passes without someone talking about it on social media, and numerous companies sprang up overnight to take advantage of the capabilities offered by ChatGPT. In this article, I'll talk about some of the powerful and exciting models offered by OpenAI. And of course, as this is a developer's magazine, my focus will be mostly on what developers can do with them. This is by no means an exhaustive view of what OpenAI offers (in fact I'm confident that things will have changed by the time…

In Part 1 of this article series (https://codemag.com/Article/2305031/Building-Web-APIs-Using-Node.js-and-Express-Part-1), you created a web server using Node.js, Express, and JavaScript. You built a series of API routes used to retrieve an array of product objects, search for a single object or a set of objects, and add, edit, and delete objects. In this article, you'll move some of the hard-coded values from the code into a configuration file and read those settings into your application. You're going to add middleware functions to handle exceptions. You're going to write different types of errors to different locations, such as to the console and to a file. Thus far, the set of product data coming from the API calls has been from a JSON file. In this article, you'll learn to retrieve the same data,…

Microservices architecture is a structural approach that organizes an application as a collection of small independent services modeled around a business domain that can communicate with one another, if need be. In this article, I'll examine GraphQL, its features and benefits, and how it compares and contrasts with REST and gRPC. I'll then discuss how you can take advantage of GraphQL to build microservices-based realtime applications in ASP.NET Core 7. joydipkanjilal@yahoo.com Joydip Kanjilal is an MVP (2007-2012), software architect, author, and speaker with more than 20 years of experience. He has more than 16 years of experience in Microsoft.NET and its related technologies. Joydip has authored eight books, more than 500 articles, and has reviewed more than a dozen books. If you're to work with the code examples discussed in…