Danny Brian

Web Components change the way you build web applications and think about front-end architecture. Finally, web developers have a sane way to scope and modularize not just their JavaScript, but also the HTML5 and styling. The approach is elegant, encourages compatibility between frameworks, and piggybacks on the web browser's success as an open and extensible runtime. The Polymer framework demonstrates how frameworks can and should evolve in a Web Components world.

In this session, I'll provide an overview of Polymer, and demonstrate the creation of Web Components using the framework. Data binding, true encapsulation of code and style, and dynamic HTML imports are all ready for your use. You will leave with a solid understanding of Polymer basics, and real-world examples of Polymer being used in production today. You will be able to guide your current development to better align with upcoming web standards, and to understand how they will change the way we build and deploy web applications. I'll also show you examples of a large personal project using Web Components to build an entire iOS application.

If the web browser is growing up, then Web Components are the browser leaving home. Finally.

With new frameworks every day, what's one more? In this workshop we will code a simple, lightweight JavaScript framework. More importantly, we will examine the features that most frameworks address, patterns to use along the way, and reasons why you may or may not need a framework at all. This workshop will teach the keys to becoming a skilled front-end developer, and show you what bits of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript you'll need to build great applications.

There's no better way to learn JavaScript than to write a simple framework! Some of the features we will create include:

• Templating
• Data binding
• Routing
• Networking
• Data synchronization

You will find a great many use cases that don't need a framework at all, especially if you're using modern browsers. We will discuss those use cases, features in HTML5, CSS3 and ES6+ which help, and a whole bunch of JavaScript patterns to make developing rich web applications easy and maintainable.

HTML5 hasn't fundamentally changed the way we build web applications — JavaScript frameworks did that. Not so with Web Components! Web Components are the most important update to HTML and the Document Object Model in recent years. They have a major impact on client-side architecture, on framework selection, and on distribution and reuse of code.

In this session, I'll explain to you the four Web Components standards, their current state, and why you should care. I'll give several examples of complex applications built in Web Components, and running in all modern browsers — including a rich mobile game.

“There's a new JS framework every week! There's a new JavaScript feature every week! There's a new HTML5 feature every week! We are losing our minds OMG@#$HELPUS!”

Settle down everybody. Shiny new frameworks distract you from the stability offered by the web platform: ES6 is the first major update to JavaScript since 2009, and HTML5 was 18 years in the making! More importantly, few of these innovations significantly change the architecture of web applications — we owe browser innovation and frameworks for that. But since the browser evolved in to a full-blown application runtime, we now need solid front-end architecture, and front-end architects. It's not just about JavaScript, it's about the entire browser platform. And you can't pick frameworks to simplify that platform until you understand its underpinnings.

In this workshop, we will dissect the components of a modern web client into three buckets:

1. Networking: How does data get to and from the client? We will discuss the various underlying APIs and libraries for client-server communication.
2. Rendering: How does the user interface get created and painted? We'll look at the HTML5 APIs for manipulating the DOM, and explain how various frameworks including AngularJS, React, and Polymer regard and manipulate the DOM.
3. Distribution & Maintenance: How does the resulting app get distributed and updated, either on the web or to app stores?

I'll lay the foundations to simplify the complex world of front-end tools, frameworks, and architecture. I'll share patterns to help you manage the complexity of front-end development and back-end integration for modern web clients. And I'll convince you to never again complain about how fast the world of front-end technologies is moving.

You don't need Node.js or MongoDB to build “full-stack” solutions, but they sure help! This stack is popular for its scalability, its promise of developer productivity, and the capability to develop all components with a single programming language. Not all use cases are a great fit for JavaScript on the server. But love it or hate it, there are valuable lessons and use cases here for all developers.

We'll examine a complete multiuser end-to-end app using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. We'll connect it to a simple Node.js instance using WebSocket. We'll wire up a simple document-oriented persistence layer with MongoDB. And we'll do it all using mostly-vanilla JavaScript to illustrate concepts that don't depend on particular frameworks.

You'll leave this session convinced that full-stack JavaScript has “teeth”, and that it's not all just hype. And whether you intend to use JavaScript, Java, Ruby, or a mix of various frameworks on the server, the architecture of a dynamic HTML5 app will be made transparent and straightforward.

Regular Expressions are an undervalued, underutilized tool in the developer toolbox. Few programming technologies have stood a comparable test of time for their capacity to improve developer productivity, to shortcut complex tasks, to reduce dependency on various libraries, and to encourage code reuse. They also help to teach patterns and improve pattern recognition, not only for code, but for programmers themselves. Competency with regexes will make you a better programmer, regardless of your choice of language or platforms. And it will impress your peers, too!

This workshop will teach you the fundamentals of writing, debugging, and testing PCREs (Perl-compatible Regular Expressions) in multiple programming languages. With hands-on examples we will cover regex syntax, metacharacters, assertions, grouping, quantifiers, greed, capturing, balanced matches, and replacing. We'll compose regexes from scratch to parse some common string formats such as URLs, email addresses, and even JSON. Given enough time, we'll even learn look-around assertions, and examine some creating uses of regexes in the field of natural language processing.

Firebase can replace your existing database, but that isn't its main use case. Instead, it enables a live synchronized data store for all your desktop and mobile apps. With little effort, you can implement Firebase on top of your existing applications, easing the load on your own infrastructure and giving you flexibility with offline storage use cases. What's more, you don't need to write any backend code to use it.

In this session I'll explain the basics of Firebase, and how to get started with it in both new and existing applications. We'll examine the brilliance of this solution, and how it manages to be secure and schema-free, while also not requiring backend code. I'll demonstrate Firebase's zero-effort authentication alternatives, and how they can enable you to not need your own application backend at all. Finally, we'll look at an entire application build on top of Firebase, its integration patterns, and the way Firebase enables scalability without breaking the bank.