When building web applications, unit testing your individual components is certainly important. However, end-to-end testing provides assurance that the final user experience of your components chained together matches the expected behavior. Testing web application behavior locally in your browser can be helpful, but this approach isn’t efficient or reliable, especially as your application grows more complex.

Ideally, end-to-end tests in your browser are automated and integrated into your CI pipeline. Every time you commit a code change, your tests will run. Passing tests gives you the confidence that the application — as your end users experience it — behaves as expected.

How to Build and Deploy a Node.js App That Uses OpenAI’s APIs

Near the end of 2023, ChatGPT announced that it had 100M weekly users. That’s a massive base of users who want to take advantage of the convenience and power of intelligent question answering with natural language.

With this level of popularity for ChatGPT, it’s no wonder that software developers are joining the ChatGPT app gold rush, building tools on top of OpenAI’s APIs. Building and deploying a GenAI-based app is quite easy to do—and we’re going to show you how!

Austen Ito is a software engineer at leading online fashion brand Bonobos, based in New York. Read our Bonobos customer story for more information about how Heroku has helped their business.

What do you have running on Heroku?

We’re running just about everything on Heroku, including our Bonobos.com website, cross-app messaging services, an API for our ERP, as well as some internal tools. The only pieces that are not on Heroku are the Data Science and ERP components. We’re also using Desk.com for customer service queuing.

Walk us through your stack

We use a mix of Backbone and React in terms of JavaScript frameworks on the front end. Some of our legacy work is in Backbone and our newer...

So you want to build an app with React? "Getting started" is easy… and then what?

React is a library for building user interfaces, which comprise only one part of an app. Deciding on all the other parts — styles, routers, npm modules, ES6 code, bundling and more — and then figuring out how to use them is a drain on developers. This has become known as javascript fatigue. Despite this complexity, usage of React continues to grow.

The community answers this challenge by sharing boilerplates. These boilerplates reveal the profusion of architectural choices developers must make. That official "Getting Started" seems so far away from the reality of an operational app.

Heroku has years of experience operating our world-class platform, and we have developed many internal tools to operate it along the way; however, with the introduction of Heroku Private Spaces, much of the infrastructure was built from the ground up and we needed new tools to operate this new platform. At the center of this, we built a new operations console to give ourselves a bird's eye view of the entire system, be able to drill down into issues in a particular space, and everything in between.

The operations console is a single-page React application with a reverse proxy on the backend to securely access data from a variety of sources. The console itself started off from a mashup...