Category Archives: JavaScript

[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

[Video 450] Sébastien Doeraene: Scala.js Workshop

JavaScript has often been described as the “assembly language of the Web.” Implied in this description is the notion that other languages can and should compile into JavaScript. We have seen examples of this, most prominently with ClojureScript. But Scala, a popular programming language that runs on the JVM, now has a version that compiles into JavaScript, as well: Scala.js. This talk, by Scala.js author Sébastien Doeraene, describes the aims of the project, how well Scala.js programs can interact with other JavaScript libraries and functionality, and what Scala’s typing does to improve the state of JavaScript programming.

[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 422] Samuel Saccone: Dealing with Garbage

One of the great things about JavaScript, and other high-level languages, is that we don’t have to manually allocate and free memory. Instead, we use memory more or less without thinking about it, relying on the garbage collector to do the hard work for us. However, this doesn’t mean that we no longer have to think about memory at all; we can still have memory leaks, as well as allocate more memory than we thought, if we’re not aware of how the language really works In this talk, Samuel Saccone where and how memory problems can arise, and (even more significantly) how we can track down and debug them.

[Video 415] Gaurav Seth: Inside Chakra

Chakra is Microsoft‘s JavaScript engine, and as of this month (January 2016), its core is now released under an open-source license. But what exactly does Chakra bring to the table? And how is it different from other JavaScript engines? In this talk, Gaurav Seth provides us a full picture of Chakra — from its origins to its current state of affairs, including licensing, technical capabilities, speed, debugging support, architecture, and future plans. If you’re interested in JavaScript — and let’s be honest, if you have a Web browser, then you should be interested — and would like to keep up on the latest in the competition among open-source JavaScript engines, then this talk should be of great interest to you.

[Video 407] Prasanna Kanagasabei: JS Security – A Pentesters Perspective

Web security is an important consideration for any application, but as JavaScript becomes an increasingly vital part of the Web, we need to consider the specifics of JavaScript.  One way to check the security of your applications is using “penetration testing,” also known as “pentesting.”  In this talk, Prasanna Kanagasabei describes his experiences as a pentester working with JavaScript, and describes the challenges and issues that he has had in trying to check JavaScript-based applications — and the things he wishes the engineers who had written those knew when writing the apps.

[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 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.