Building most single-page applications (SPAs for short) is a two-step process: first you create a JSON API in a backend technology of choice and then you use that API in the JavaScript application. Here we'll be using Ruby on Rails on the backend and AngularJS on the frontend.

Bower is an open source software created by Twitter, which simplifies dependencies management and updating of front-end packages (like gridism or normalize). In general it is the same thing for HTML/CSS/JS what Bundler is for Ruby. Not so long time ago version 1.0 has been released and the current stable version is 1.2. Let's take a look at how to use it and integrate with a Rails app.

When working on web applications we take a lot of supporting technology for granted. We build our code on top of a multi-layered network stack with HTTP as the glue. Each user interaction with our app may cause several HTTP requests that are routed and handled separately, often in parallel. Most of the time developers don't have to care how exactly this magic works. Sometimes though, performance requirements force them to dig deeper. We at Shelly Cloud want to empower our users, that's why we decided to share details of our internal architecture.

Today we're going to describe what route an HTTP requests takes, from the moment it leaves the browser up to the moment a response gets back from the server.

Second part of this article builds upon this knowledge and describes multiple failure scenarios.