Category Archives: Web 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 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 443] Josh Aas: Let’s Encrypt — A Free, Automated, and Open CA

Increasingly, Web sites want to be secure and encrypted. It doesn’t matter if you’re running a huge e-commerce site or just a lowly blog; the trend is clear, that having an HTTPS-encrypted site is a good thing to do. If that’s the case, then why don’t more people do it? Part of it is the cost — to have a secure site, you need to get a certificate from a (potentially expensive) certificate authority (CA). Let’s Encrypt is a new service that aims to make it easy and free to set up an HTTPS-powered site. In this talk, Josh Aas describes Let’s Encrypt — the motivations, the technology, and the issues remaining before HTTPS can be universally available.

Time: 1:32

[Video 439] Nick Sullivan: NGINX + https 101 — The Basics & Getting Started

Security has always been an important consideration for Web developers. However, in the last few years, many sites have been pushing (or been pushed) to use only HTTPS  (a secure version of HTTP) for their site. PCI regulations effectively require that a site only use HTTPS, and large sites such as Google and Facebook encourage (and sometimes demand) that a site refuse unencrypted HTTP requests.  This means that many sites which could previously ignore the calls for HTTPS now need to use and install it. In this talk, Nick Sullivan introduces the ideas behind HTTPS, and walks new developers/administrators through the process of making an nginx-backed site HTTPS-compliant.

Time: 36m

[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 389] Karthik Ananth: Scrapy Workshop

So, you want to download information from the Web? Great — but if the data isn’t available via an API, then you’re going to need to scrape it.  That means retrieving the HTML, parsing it, and turning into data you can really use.  A popular way to do so in Python is scrapy, an open-source framework for crawling and downloading data. In this talk, Karthik Ananth introduces scrapy, and demonstrates why it’s a powerful tool for creating your own crawlers, either for widespread scraping purposes for specific, single-use projects.

[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 349] Stepan Ilyin: Making applications secure with NGINX

nginx is an increasingly popular HTTP server, in no small part because of its ability to scale massively. Because of its modular architecture, nginx is used not only on its own, but also with many third-party modules that add functionality to the core HTTP server. One module, Naxsi, provides administrators with the ability to filter (and reject) certain patterns of URLs, request headers, locations, and other suspect requests that might cause more harm than good. In this talk, Stepan Ilyin introduces naxsi and other nginx-based security techniques that, if used, can reduce the chances of someone taking down your Web application.