Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Tim Oxley shows us how to harness the browser to do some of the heavy-lifting. See below for full session description and more resources.

Got a taste for it? Be there for the dev track at Web Directions South 2012.

This presentation was recorded at Web Directions Code in Melbourne on May 24 2012.

Session description

Today’s web browser is a powerful application platform, challenging the traditional responsibilities of web application server and client. In this session we learn to harness the browser to do some of the heavy-lifting traditionally delegated to the server-side.
Pushing rendering tasks onto the web browser reduces the amount of hand-holding required of a server, minimising network utilisation and lag involved in user interactions. This decouples our views from our server implementation and can improve overall application performance. Your web applications will feel snappy and light­weight, presenting a more pleasant user experience.
We will explore the implications of client-side rendering and the differences between popular client-side templating tools, such as jQuery templates, EJS, Underscore and Handlebars, evaluating compatibility, performance, expressiveness and project health, while comparing statistics and user experience with traditional server-side templating techniques.

Resources referred to in this presentation

• Asynchronous UIs – the future of web user interfaces
• The client-side templating throwdown
• Unless you have a very good reason not to, use Handlebars
• Recommended framework: Ember.js
• Staticloud
• eson – Extended (pluggable) JSON for node
• Learn to say no to clients
• Don’t give your clients a CMS
• Just teach them to write JSON, or even better, CSON
• And have them markup their pages using Markdown
• Build tools are your friends, learn to use Make
• And be more like TJ

About Tim Oxley

Tim works primarily on the NodeJS platform, building lightweight data and interconnectivity services for business. Since leaping from Flash’s burning carcass, Tim has been honing his skills as a professional JavaScript developer while championing professional programming practices as a consultant in Australia and worldwide.