Yehuda Katz(http://yehudakatz.com/) had a brief visit to Brisbane Australia, doing a public presentation, and a more private breakfast meeting. In this blog post I’m going over some of the things that struck me as particularly interesting or worth thinking about.
For those of you who don’t know Yehuda, he is an opinionated and very active developer. Yehuda is a member of the JQuery and Ruby on Rails core teams, and he is also one of the founders of Ember.js (a framework for building rich MVC JavaScript applications – http://emberjs.com).
In the public talk Yehuda went through ember.js, talking through what the paradigm of the framework is, and walking through a demo of some of the key features of the framework. It looks like an interesting option for JavaScript applications. It’s on the brink of going 1.0, but already has some high profile applications using the framework. Apart from seeing the interesting elements of ember and how it’s used, it was very interesting to see the way people are using Ember.js with D3: http://corner.squareup.com/2012/04/building-analytics.html
I’m definitely going to keep my on the framework as it moves forward.
In his spare time Yehuda is working to push the future of the web in ways that help facilitate rich applications. He has got a couple of ways that he is doing this:
- he is a member of the W3C TAG
- he is working to influence members of the chrome team to build things well.
W3C TAG
The Technical Architecture Group works to specify and guide the architecture of the web moving forward. It has the feel of a good internal architecture group in an organisation, filled with smart people trying to make the web better (it’s membership includes Tim Berners-Lee and representatives of the community, large organisations and browser vendors).
Chrome Team
Through some of the work Yehuda has done, he has had opportunity to spend time with some of the people building new versions of Chrome, and helping to guide some of the thinking towards making apis and decisions that work well for web developers.
So I should have convinced you that Yehuda has some stuff worth listening to. Over the period of time he was I had some good opportunities to listen to both his public conversations and hear some of the more informal conversations. Here are some of the things that I found particularly interesting around where he sees the web heading.
Web RTC looks like a cool technology for real time communications (http://www.webrtc.org/). The support for peer connections looks particularly interesting.
The new world being demonstrated by google polymer (http://www.polymer-project.org/) looks to be very exciting. Definitely well worth a look for web developers who want to get an idea of the way they will be writing applications in the future. Model Driven Views (http://www.polymer-project.org/platform/mdv.html), and custom elements (http://www.polymer-project.org/platform/custom-elements.html) are extremely exciting, and the shadow dom (http://www.polymer-project.org/platform/shadow-dom.html) looks like a good tool for helping to support and customise the new features brought in. The HTML + CSS workflow currently is the language of the web, with many people speaking it, and with these tools, I think the language is moving in good directions.
The mechanisms for doing asynchronous JavaScript have been moving on from the straight callback approach that has been familiar to people, particularly through the use of node. There has been much discussion around the web around promises and futures, with things heading towards promises. Martin Fowler has an article describing JavaScript promises (http://martinfowler.com/bliki/JavascriptPromise.html), which is where the W3C TAG is currently headed (http://infrequently.org/2013/06/sfuturepromiseg/). I look forward to having this come into play, and having a standard option that doesn’t involve the deep nesting that can come from callback nesting.
It was interesting hearing Yehuda’s perspective on computer science and functional topics like Monads and functional reactive programming. The binding approach used in Ember.js takes inspiration from FRP, and Promises allow a transformation to a monadic approach.
One of the interesting new things coming to javascript in browsers is object.observe, a feature which will make it possible to observe any object for modifications on it or its attributes.
All in all there is a bunch of interesting stuff in the web future. It’s a great time to be doing web development, and I look forward to what the future holds.