Jonathan Jeter

Director of Application Development

Home Archives for Application programming interface

HTML5 Texas JavaScript Workshop – Client-Side Storage

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HTML5TX JavaScript Workshop - Pamela FoxWeb technologies have taken a long time to progress.

A lot of the standards we see today are because browsers decided to implement new features.

HTML5 is now just supposed to be HTML. It is supposed to be a living standard.

Pamela needs an HTML app that helps choose her hair color.

Client-Side Storage

Cookies are used for all types of tracking, but they have issues with security, user trust (can be disabled), performance and size.

In the HTML spec, they considered the issues and came up with the following solutions.

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localStorage

  • Key / value pairs – hash table
  • Persistent on page reloads
  • Avoids HTTP overhead of cookies

Backbone: 3 Ways

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by Pamela Fox at HTML5 Texas Conference, Austin, Texas (Deck)

Backbone is one of the most popular MVC frameworks for JavaScript these days, and one of the reasons for its popularity is that its minimal and lightweight. That makes it easy to use in different ways and adapt to different projects – but can also make it hard to learn. In this talk, I’ll start with Backbone basics, and then dive into three different ways that we use it to power the frontends of Coursera.org.

Backbone 3 Ways HTML5TX

Why use an MVC framework? Website includes: 242 js files, 28848 lines of code & 5-person frontend team. Needed more structure to their code.
Why Backbone?

Backbone JS MVC Diagram

Backbone is a lightweight model view controller framework. Models use set & get so the framework know what’s going on. Collections group objects together. Views with basic data binding. Router is available, but you don’t have to use it.

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Killer App Design with Javascript and HTML 5

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HTML5 and Complex Web Apps

Web 2.0 vs HTML5 apps

Web 2.0

  • Dynamic content
  • Database driven
  • Social applications
  • Stupid name
  • “The Internet is more than lame dancing genies and hit counters!”

HTML5 Apps

  • Interactive content
  • Real-time
  • Task-oriented
  • Cool logo
  • “You can have a desktop experience in your browser”
  • Not trying to replicate a desktop software experience.

HTML5 – New Markup (separating functionality and presentation in the DOM with data-* attributes)

Amazing JavaScript APIs

Application Architecture

Lots of tools available that will allow for a more robust application development process.

  • Moving state to the client
  • Wep app Kool-Aid: MVC/MVVM, pub/sub and the module pattern
  • Your application as an API

Don’t do it alone

Toolkits, precompilers, boilerplates, and more

For the enterprise-y among you

Testing, IDEs and other developer tools

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