Declarative AJAX - Minimizing Complexity In Modern Web Applications

Declarative programming describes what a program should achieve in terms of a problem domain, rather than describing how to achieve it using a sequence of primitive operations. It has long been considered a powerful tool for minimizing complexity of software systems. In this talk we will discuss how to apply the declarative programming paradigm to modern AJAX-based web applications using intercooler.js.

We will begin with a brief overview of intercooler.js, a library that enables a declarative approach to AJAX requests. We will discuss:

  • The core HTML attributes that drive an intercooler-based web application
  • Declarative mechanisms for triggering AJAX requests
  • Intercooler request and response formats, including custom HTTP Headers
  • CSS Transitions

Once we have covered these basics, we will examine a few typical web application UX needs and how they can be addressed using the declarative style:

  • Inline editing
  • Lazy loading elements on a page
  • Infinite scrolling
  • Bulk table operations with visual easements
  • Implementing a Pause/Play UI to tail a server side resource

After this talk, the attendee should have a good grasp of how to build a modern web application using declarative programming techniques with intercooler.js


Carson Gross

About Carson Gross

Carson Gross has been programming professionally since 1999, doing web development, web infrastructure work and programming language design. He is currently splits his time between being CEO and co-founder of LeadDyno (http://leaddyno.com), an online affiliate marketing tool, and work in the Programming Languages Group at Guidewire Software, where he works on the Gosu JVM programming language (http://gosu-lang.github.io). He is the main developer of intercooler.js (http://intercoolerjs.org) which allows developers to create modern AJAX-based web applications with almost no client-side code. He did his undergraduate work (BS) at Cal and his graduate work (MS) at Stanford. He currently lives in Sacramento, California.

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