Notes from FluentConf 2012

fluentconfnotes.md

General Dev Notes

1. Fast development is important
   • good IDEs, local development, fast servers
   • linting in the IDE / as soon as possible
   • live reload CSS
2. Fast testing is important as well
   • make it easy to see test results soon
   • commit-hooks? CI server?
   • Use grunt / phantomJS / casperJS
3. De-normalized and local data is fast (NoSQL!)
4. Caching HTML is important as well
   • Varnish, others..
5. WebSockets are awesome and blazingly fast

Web Dev Notes

1. Rendering HTML faster than rendering JS which then renders HTML
2. Current best-practice for rendering:
   • server-side rendering of HTML first load
   • client-side rendering for future things
   • update URLs with HTML5 History API
   • see: conditional-tier rendering
3. Future best-practice may include web sockets after first load instead of AJAX
   • See: Meteor.js
4. Use the minimum amount of JS possible in any given situation
   • Declarative HTML often simpler. see @fat's talk on boostrap.js
5. Web Components Spec may replace current templating / ui library solutions
   • see @fat's talk on building bootstrap.js
6. Make sure your 3rd party scripts are non-blocking (async, defer, or fancier techniques).
   • Your script just killed my site
   • High Performance Snippers
7. Basically backbone.js is the way people build web-apps
   • some people are using ender.js and spine.js instead
   • Sencha Touch liked by a few people doing mobile, but still small
   • Require.js often used in conjunction
8. Use requestAnimationFrame for JS animations and games

Related Slides

1. http://www.slideshare.net/nzakas/maintainable-javascript-2012 just bought the book as well
2. https://speakerdeck.com/u/anguscroll/p/how-we-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-javascript fancy inheritance and mixin patterns
3. http://www.slideshare.net/ariyahidayat/javascript-parser-infrastructure-for-code-quality-analysis Really fancy code analysis using something called Esprima. JSHint.next is based on this!

Mobile Notes

1. There isn't a single best way to do mobile
   • This is really my biggest take away from the Ben & Dion talk
   • There are varying degrees of "hybrid"
2. Mobile Web Can Be A Lot Better (Android notwithstanding)
   • Made me want to try and push the boundaries a bit further
   • Probably want to use backbone.js and try really hard to make it look cool
   • Lots of cool APIs coming in the future
3. Canvas renders well on mobile
   • Not sure how to take advantage of this yet...
4. Native apps aren't going anywhere
   • Their popularity is huge
   • No reason they'll die off tomorrow
   • Doesn't mean mobile web isn't going to win eventually
5. Chrome Dev Tools adds touch events and UA spoofing
6. Chrome for Android the best mobile browser

Related Videos

http://functionsource.com/post/the-state-of-web-vs-apps-our-version-of-coke-vs-hehhpepsi Ben & Dion's Web vs. Native