Category Archives: Client-side development

[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 433] Tom Dale: An Update on FastBoot

Starting in late 2014, the lead developers of the client-side (JavaScript) framework Ember.js announced their “FastBoot” project, aimed at providing for server-side rendering for Ember applications. The idea is that if you can render things on the server, in Node.js, then you’ll increase the speed of these browser-based applications.  In this talk, Tom Dale provides an update on the status of FastBoot, describing what it is, what it aims to do, how it will help Ember developers (and users), and what needs to be done for it to be completed.

Time: 25m

Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/tomdale/an-update-on-fastboot

[Video 427] Chris Eppstein: The expanding boundaries of CSS

Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) is the way in which we describe the design and layout of Web pages. But is CSS a programming language, or something less than one? And have those boundaries changed over time? And what does this mean for the people creating and modifying stylesheets; what skills do they need to have? In this talk, Chris Eppstein describes what CSS has been, is, and will be, and how this will affect front-end design.

[Video 423] Ben Briggs: Intelligent CSS optimisation

For years, front-end developers have employed “minification” to turn CSS into something that’s short, and thus faster to download,  Minification techniques have improved over the years, with some providing a great degree of compression. In this talk, Ben Briggs describes the latest version of CSSNano, and how it works to minify CSS, and how it improves on previous generations of minifiers.

[Video 413] Chandu Tennety: A Bird’s Eye View of ClojureScript

ClojureScript is getting lots of attention as an elegant way to write client-side programs. But what sorts of things can you really do? What sorts of applications are made possible by ClojureScript? In this talk, Chandu Tennety describes an application he wrote to analyze and visualize bird migration. He describes how they read the data, interfaced with other libraries (e.g., D3), and even stored the data using Datomic.

Time: 58m

[Video 395] Jack Franklin: ES6 Modules & React with SystemJS

Everyone in the JavaScript world is talking about the next generation of JavaScript, known as ES6. But how does ES6 integrate with the other JavaScript improvements and libraries, such as modules (via System.js), and even React.js? In this talk, Jack Franklin demonstrates how to build a modern application in JavaScript, using some of the latest tools, language extensions, and libraries in the JavaScript world.

[Video 393] Glen Maddern: The Rise of Modular Style

Every modern programming language has a facility for creating modules, or external libraries. Modules allow you to break a program apart, making it easier for multiple people to collaborate, and for programmers to concentrate on smaller, more easily solved problems abstracting away larger and other issues. Even JavaScript, which has famously failed to include modules for many years, now has such a facility. But CSS, which allows us to describe the design of Web sites, is not modular, which means that definitions are repeated, spread across files, and are generally less organized and abstract than they could be. In this talk, Glen Maddern describes work he has done toward creating CSS modules, including how they work and can benefit developers and designers.

[Video 376] Derek Slager: ClojureScript for Skeptics

ClojureScript is a version of the Clojure language that compiles into JavaScript, and thus runs inside of your browser. Given the improvements in the newest version of JavaScript (aka ES6), people are starting to wonder about the need for, or viability of, languages that compile into JavaScript. In this talk, Derek Slager describes his experiences with the language — and how ClojureScript can help to solve many of the problems that JavaScript developers experience.

[Video 331] Martin Gontovnikas: Rethinking backend with webtasks

Front-end development is popular and necessary — but it is also hampered by the fact that everything happens on the client. Perhaps “hampered” is too strong of a word, but there are times when a front-end developer wants or needs access to a server. In this talk, Martin Gontovnikas introduces “webtasks,” which can be described as a small backend application to support a large front-end application.

[Video 330] Hugo Giraudel: 3 years of purging Sass

CSS, the layout and formatting language of the Web, is hard for many people to use. Sass is one of several CSS supersets and/or replacements that have emerged over the years, allowing us to write our CSS more expressively and concisely. In this talk, Hugo Giraudel describes many of the Sass mistakes that he has seen, and corrected, in numerous open-source projects over the last few years — and thus, indicates ways in which you can improve your use of Sass,  and thus clean up your stylesheets.