JSFoo 2014

To show you how a best-practice combination of the latest javascript technologies brought together into a clean cohesive solution that accomplishes pure awesome.

Usually this is a pretty messy accomplishment, or just has old-generation tech stuck together with newer tech, or people using buzz word projects rather than what actually makes sense. This talk will cover why this select stack works so well for this, keeps complexity down low, keeps the codebase beautiful, and how others were tried for this and didn’t make sense.

Expect to:

• Understand the complexities of building realtime applications, and how they can be avoided
• Understand the complexities of building node.js applications, and how they can be avoided
• Understand the complexities of building frontend applications, and how they can be best addressed
• Learn best practices for building realtime web applications, why they are important, and what you can use for them

Outline

Over the past 8 weeks I was contracted to build and innovative app, and began re-evaluating the best tech and practices that is out there, and become a student again to try a bunch of things. Over this time I evaulated pretty much everything there is, and came up with the following stack, which will include comparisons with other projects for each part.

• Node.js on the backend
• Express as the server framework
• Feathers for realtime api exposure
• Primus for realtime connection
• Redis (and Mongo) for the database
• Polymer for the UI layer + two way template bindings
• DocPad for frontend generation

It works really well. We’re seeking permission to demo the app we built, however if this talk gets accepted we’ll also begin work on an open-source project that uses the same tech with a lot of documentation for you all to try and work with.

Requirements

The talk will be ascessible to everyone, with everyone getting learnings. Those which have done javascript and/or frontend development for a while will be able to appreciate the depth of learnings in it as they will be able to relate the pain and pleasures to their own experiences.

Speaker bio

Benjamin’s calling in life to empower everyone to do what they love, share it with the entire world, and live well. His work is used by pretty much everyone (Microsoft, Adobe, GitHub, etc), and is one of the most active github users in the world. The past year he’s been working with Polymer (Web Components) and WebRTC to build some interesting things, and before that he worked on DocPad (the most popular node.js static site generator) for 3 years and built History.js (cross-browser support for stateful web applications) which has gone on to be very popular. These days he’s still with open-source and looking into trainings.

Links

• http://balupton.com