Next Generation HTML5 and JavaScript

The Browser is becoming the default platform and this track is about its de facto standards: HTML5 and JavaScript. Leading experts in the field will provide valuable insight into how they leverage HTML5 and JavaScript for building innovative products and services. Presentations will cover several issues like motivations, best-practices, security considerations, deployment patterns and more.

Day of week:

Wednesday

Location:

Grand Ballroom B/C

Host:

Dio Synodinos

Presentations

Building URL-Driven Web Apps with Ember.js

10:30am - 11:20am

By: Tom Dale
Co-creator of Ember.js

Developers have begun to notice that, using JavaScript, they can build fast, sophisticated UIs that users love. But they have also noticed that tacking more and more JavaScript on top of the traditional architecture of server-rendered HTML has led to unwieldy code that is hard to reason about and extend.

There is a better way, and it's been sitting under our noses all along. If we begin to think about our web applications as just consumers of an API, like how we build our native and mobile clients, we can achieve better separation of concerns, fewer lines of code, and UIs that we could only previously have dreamt about. At the same time, we have to make sure that these 100% JavaScript apps don't break the key feature of the web: the URL. Users rely on the URL to bookmark, share and collaborate, but many JavaScript frameworks treat it like an afterthought.

In this talk, we'll examine the core architecture needed to build JavaScript applications that don't feel busted, then discuss the specific implementation of those details in Ember.js.

HTML5 and JavaScript Open Space

4:05pm - 4:55pm

By:

Managing JavaScript Complexity

1:35pm - 2:25pm

By: Jarrod Overson
Software Engineer at Riot Games

JavaScript is notorious for its pitfalls and inhospitable development environments but it's impossible to ignore its value as it continues to grow. In order to maximize that value it is important to keep the cost of writing and maintaining modern JavaScript applications under control. Frequent changes in specs and APIs, new best practices that invalidate the old, and tools that are only just now coming of age make minimizing complexity more relevant in the Web Platform than in any other development environment. We'll go over some of the many ways to quantify and reduce JavaScript complexity as well as some of the techniques the experts use to create maintainable JavaScript. After this session you will be able to understand:

What makes up the metrics used to quantify code complexity
Methods to reduce complexity in JavaScript applications
How to quantify and visualize complexity with current tools

Presentations

Meteor -Web Development Like You've Never Seen

2:50pm - 3:40pm

By: Matt Debergalis
Creator of meteorjs

Those of us building modern applications in HTML5 and JavaScript face a new set of challenges, distinct from those of the previous era of server-centric web applications. How, for example, do we transition the web from a "dumb terminal" model that is based on serving HTML, to a client/server model that is based on exchanging data? How do we design software to run in a radically distributed environment, where even everyday database apps are spread over multiple data centers and hundreds of intelligent client devices, and must integrate with other software at dozens of other organizations? How do we prepare for a world where most web APIs will be push-based (realtime), rather than polling-driven? And in the face of escalating complexity, how can we simplify software engineering so that more people can do it? Meteor is a distribution of modular, open-source packages that solve these problems in a principled and off-the-shelf way. This talk will highlight some of those components and show how they work together to dramatically shorten the development cycle, whether you're a team of expert developers or just getting started.

Reactive Javascript at Netflix

5:20pm - 6:10pm

By: Jafar Husain
Senior Developer at Netflix

What's does a mouse drag event have in common with an Array of numbers?

The answer to this question may surprise you: they are both collections. This key insight holds the key to dramatically simplifying asynchronous programming in Javascript. In this talk you will learn how you can use the familiar Javascript Array methods to create surprisingly expressive asynchronous programs. Using just a few functions, you will learn how to do the following:

Declaratively build complex events out of simple events (ex. drag n' drop)
Coordinate and sequence multiple Ajax requests
Reactively update UI's in response to data changes
Eliminate memory leaks caused by neglecting to unsubscribe from events
Gracefully propagate and handle asynchronous exceptions

https://rx.codeplex.com/

Advanced front-end debugging

11:45am - 12:35pm

By: Panos Astithas
Firefox Engineer, Developer Tools Team

Modern Web applications are large and complex systems that often require multi-person teams working for many months to build. Developing such complex software requires equally advanced tools to highlight potential problems and boost developer productivity. From consoles and debuggers, to profilers and tracers, the modern developer tools offer a powerful alternative to the traditional debugging method of alert().

In this talk we will examine how these tools work and how we can put them to good use in identifying some common classes of bugs in our programs. We will cover tools about debugging JavaScript code, as well as tools about inspecting the runtime characteristics of our programs. And we will also see how profiling tools can help us make our code faster and smaller at the same time. From closures to promises and from layout flushes to source maps, we will see how many common pitfalls can be avoided in desktop or mobile web applications using such advanced tools.