[Video 458] Kara Erickson and Victor Savkin: Angular 2 updates

Angular is one of the most popular front-end frameworks. Angular 2 promises to be even more interesting and useful — but it’s also going to be very different from Angular 1.  Now  that Angular 2 is in beta, what does it look like?   Developers are being encouraged to use TypeScript when developing in Angular 2; how does that affect how the system works?  Finally, what sorts of new JavaScript capabilities will Angular expect or demand? This talk by Kara Erickson and Victor Savkin introduces the capabilities of Angular 2, giving us a preview of what the team is creating, and how it can/should be used.

(Note: The actual talk starts at 5:30, after some announcement.)

Total time: 1:40

[Video 457] Reginald Braithwaite: First-Class Commands — An unexpectedly fertile design pattern

Functional programming is well known for, among other things, treating functions as data, allowing us to store, create, pass, and return them within a program. This has led to all sorts of interesting techniques, most having to do with holding onto functions until we need to use them. Object-oriented programming languages offer us a similar idea, as the “command pattern” — but where can and should we use it? What problems can be solved elegantly by incorporating the command pattern into our code? In this talk, Reginald Braithwaite introduces the command pattern in a number of different contexts, giving us insight into where and how we can incorporate it into our own work. While examples are in JavaScript,  these ideas can be used in any object-oriented language.

Time: 33 minutes

[Video 456] Scott Hanselman: JavaScript, The Cloud, and the Rise of the New Virtual Machine

It has often been said that JavaScript is the assembly language of the Web. But as JavaScript becomes an increasingly popular target for other languages (in the browser, or on the server) and as virtual machines make it easy, perhaps it’s time for us to think about what constitutes an operating system, and what it means to have a “computer” running a program. Emulation, and virtual machines, make all sorts of new architectures possible.  What is the role of the browser vs. the server? What can we expect to see as we move forward, given the ubiquity of JavaScript and VMs?  And what can we learn from classic computer architecture and languages as we move forward?  In this talk, Scott Hanselman discusses all of these topics.

Time: 1 hour