Talk: How We Scaled Front End Development - Practical Lessons on Scaling JS Apps

Praveen Selvam

The practical question every front end developer has to answer is how well a library weaves into the JS stack used by the existing apps. The past year saw an extensive growth in the space of what we call “Front End Ops”, where tools such as Gulp, Bower, Yeoman, etc. have been key in moving a lot of automated work into JS, that previously used to be solved using Ruby, Python, or similar scripting solutions. In this talk, I will use our startup story as a backbone to elicit the various techniques, principles and strategies we used to conceptualize, build, and ship our JS apps. Of course, the challenges are included as well!

Talk: Building a lightweight mobile website using nodejs

Arvind Sridharan

This session will help developers apply practices that we have used at stayzilla.com to make our website lightweight. It will also give an overview of how we have used node js to build a production ready web application. The motivation behind building our mobile website on nodejs was to make it lightweight and also to easily integrate with our php codebase by consuming json data. Also building a seperate mobile website gave us the option to create a mobile first design and therefore make the user experience better.

Workshop: Building single page apps with React.JS

Vagmi Mudumbai

ReactJS helps us build Reactive UIs with javascript. It was built by Facebook and is used by open source editors like Atom. ReactJS builds a Virtual DOM instead of using Browser’s DOM that allows Single Page Apps to run at 50fps even on mobile browsers. This also simplifies the View code as there is no need to track the state of the DOM and can simply re-render the view without affecting the performance.

The workshop will be structured into three parts. The first and third part will talk about the state of React and its path going forward and the meat of the workshop would be a hands on approach in building a Todo List app using a parse backend and the UI built with React.JS and Backbone.
1. A quick intro to React.JS and JSX
2. Build a todolist app with React.JS and Backbone
3. A quick intro to Flux and upcoming projects like React Router similar projects like HTMLBars