Sessions at Stir Trek: Avengers Edition about JavaScript on Friday 4th May

Remember the good old days, when it was still cool to hate JavaScript and stick with our more comfortable, familiar server-side tools? I sure do! But, alas, as web applications continue to offer increasingly dynamic user interfaces, it's never been more important to ensure that you're delivering well-crafted, maintainable JavaScript.

In this talk, you'll be introduced to a number of tools and approaches that will help you write more manageable client-side code, whether to enhance traditional web applications or to embark on building your next entire applications in JavaScript. Expect to get exposure to a lot of new tools and libraries, including Backbone.js, Underscore.js, and CoffeeScript.

My name is Joe and I am a Javascript developer. It feels good to get that off my chest. As a developer on a team, clean code is a priority. Disorganized code, no matter the language, makes bugs hard to find and even harder to fix. Despite this most client-side codebases remain messy and neglected, making all who maintain them go insane. We follow many common patterns in server side code to help our fellow developers understand the code we wrote. These same patterns are becoming more and more common in client-side code. In this talk, I will share how I wrapped my head around the Model View Controller pattern applied to Javascript and compare some of the popular choices for client-side MVC. You will leave this talk with some pros and cons of the different options available as well as why you would want to use an MVC framework and (more importantly) why you might not.

Ember.js is one of the latest fish to enter the sea of options for client-side JavaScript frameworks. Like the others, it aims to provide structure and maintainability to your JavaScript-heavy apps and to help you build complex functionality quickly. Unlike many of the others, it comes with a substantial learning curve and an unimpressive amount of guidance to help you along your way. In this talk I’ll walk you through the basics of Ember, then dive into the the guts of a real application to see Ember code in the wild.

Test-Driven Development offers firm confidence that the code being written works, provides continuous feedback of what should come next, encourages problems be broken down into small components, and leaves in its wake a suite of regression tests that can be run continuously as part of a build.

Adopting TDD for JavaScript may help you address many of the most common complaints made against client-side code, such as: a lack of confidence in what will work, the slow feedback of constant page refreshes, ever-growing anonymous functions, and the fear that making a new change will inadvertently break something else.

You'll walk away from this session with a grasp on basic Jasmine specs and syntax, reference points for how to specify AJAX interactions and complex DOM manipulations, and awareness of a number of tools that make the development experience as smooth and enjoyable as it is with your preferred server-side language.