Jonathan Jeter

Director of Application Development

Home Archives for Web application

You Got your MVC into my Components: Adding Bindings to Enyo

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by Ben Combee at the HTML5 Texas Conference in Austin, TX

Enyo (http://enyojs.com) started as an web application framework, focusing on the problem of effectively building reusable UI components.  However, many app developers view problems through a Model-View-Controller (MVC) point-of-view where the UI is seen as a templating problem.  This talk looks at how the Enyo framework evolved in late 2012 to take on aspects of MVC, integrating support for Backbone models and data binding into our component & message passing architecture.  In doing so, it reveals what these two worlds can learn from each other, and how they both play into future work on the “web platform”.

Adding bindings to EnyoEnyo help build html apps with the feel of native apps.

A new way of thinking

How do you keep application state?

Templates are not enough. Interactive controls are hard to put into templates.

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Managing a Large Front-End Project with Automated Build Tools

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by kperch at HTML5 Texas Conference in Austin, TX

How do you manage a huge web application’s front-end when you have a diverse team of programmers, and javascript is not a strong suit for all of them? How do you handle both new and old code from multiple developers, and make sure only quality code makes it into your repos? Automated tools such as Yeoman and Grunt are not just for packaging your web project in a performant and clean package. They also allow you to enforce code quality and consistency through automated quality checking, testing, and beautification. This talk will go over the case study of a large web application in need of a refactor and test suite, and how tools such as Yeoman and Grunt allow you to implement a plan to bring projects like these back from the brink, without losing your sanity in the process.

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The Right Tool for the Job: Native or Mobile Web? at #SXSW2012

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Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas #sxsw #righttool
Panel discussion by Buzz Andersen (Dir of Mobile – Tumblr), Jacob Bijani (Prod Engineer – Tumblr), Majd Taby (Software Engineer – Facebook), Matthew Delaney (WebKit Engineer), and Tom Dale (Sr Software Engineer – Ember.js)

Apps are much easier to monetize than websites, because you can charge up front.

for Tumblr T-shirt Contest / 01 (Photo credit: albyantoniazzi)

The browser rendering engine does a lot of the heavy work that native developers have to contend with. The web browser is a highly evolved medium for content delivery and rich layout.

Read the rest of The Right Tool for the Job: Native or Mobile Web? at #SXSW2012

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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Jared Spool – The Essential Principles behind Great Design Principles

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UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 24, 2011

Jared Spool, CEO & Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering and co-author of Web Anatomy, started the session by showing examples of web sites that had serious usabilities. Some of the designs were attractive, but did not serve the users needs. In most examples, the user had to click multiple items or jump back and forth between pages or flyouts (a process he referred to as “pogo-sticking”) to find the information that would help them make the decision they were supposed to make to allow them to continue with the process. The takeaway was that when we encounter a problem in our application that hinders users, we should strive to help people make a choice in the easiest way possible.

Dieter Rams

Dieter Rams was the first person to create a standardized set of design principles, which are as follows:

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Julie Zhuo – Facebook: Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven Design Decisions

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UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 23, 2011

Julie Zhuo – Facebook - Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven Design Decisions
Julie Zhuo – Facebook - Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven Design Decisions

Facebook likes the start-up culture. They believe in small teams: photos, engagement, etc. Each team is treated like a small company with a product designer, researcher, engineers & a product manager.

Facebook uses data to form a lot of the decisions that are made. Data helps understand how users use product and how they can be optimized.

Facebook had great ideas, built products and then left them to move on to the next thing.

Photos

Were using an old photo uploader tool built in Java, didn’t work well and was poorly designed. Built their own tool, which required a plugin. Tested it and only 34% users successfully uploaded photos. Went back to the drawing board. Research showed that people were bailing at the plugin install step.

Read the rest of Julie Zhuo – Facebook: Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven Design Decisions

Josh Clark – Mobile Apps: Native or Web-Based?

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UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 23, 2011

Josh Clark (author of TapWorthy) – Mobile Apps-Native or Web-Based
Josh Clark – Mobile Apps-Native or Web-Based?

Josh Clark, Author of TapWorthy

Mobile Apps

Mobile is growing quickly, with many platforms (many cultures)

App design needs to take mobile culture into accounts, how to develop for a iPhone user vs Android user, etc.

Read the rest of Josh Clark – Mobile Apps: Native or Web-Based?

Blackberry still has 40% of the global enterprise

  • Text-centric
  • low browser activity (blackberry browser has sucked until recently, when they adopted webkit)
  • how does your app fit into a text heavy culture

iPhone

  • active
  • high browser activity
  • spenders (big buyers – 70% of ebays mobile commerce is iPhone; eBay accounts for 25% of mobile commerce)
  • older, wealthier
  • according to OKCupid, iPhone users have more sex

Android

  • it’s about the technology
  • it’s about tools and features
  • customization
  • cutting edge
  • technically-proficient, customized