Angular Connect 2015

I am a backend guy, always have been, and for me, specially for me, the front end development is another world. Since I started my career 8 years ago I have done some front end as well, but most of the time only maintaining something that already exists or small new bits on a bigger system, never something greenfield.

Some time ago I created an entire admin web app using KnockoutJS, it was awesome, I had already the notion of MVVM as I did some development in Android and WPF using this model and was a quite fast learning process.

Recently, since I started that project in KnockoutJS, I'm trying to look more into front end libraries and development in general, the one I most like is AngularJS, it is a shame it will be replaced soon, but is definitely a good start and the community is still huge. Also, large companies as Google are still using this and new stuff are still coming around.

As I am interested in this topic I joined a Slack channel to talk about Angular in my job, in Sky there are lots of projects using this library and the guys at NOW TV and Sky Store are awesome, they really know what they are doing. As I was part of the channel I was invited to go to the Angular Connect 2015, that happened last week at the Excel, in East London.

I felt a little bit weird on the middle of all those front end developers with their fancy macbooks, but in the end was awesome, I could understand most of the things and it was a good opportunity to see what is happening on the front end development world.

The one I most liked was spoken by my colleague Ricardo Mallols, he talked about "Sign up journey at Sky TV - building advanced forms for millions of users" and how they created a sexy way to display multiple kinds of (standard and non standard) input fields with different strategies to validate them in a hierarchical, structured and scalable way, providing real time contextual feedback to the user in order to keep the best UX possible.

This is his presentation (it's totally worth watching, he showed how to use Super Mario in HTML5 as validation for one of the controls):

There were some other very interesting that grabbed my attention: 

• Full-Stack Angular 2: Angular is no longer just a client-side framework. You can use Angular 2 core and many of its related libraries on the server. This opens the doors for some interesting possibilities. In this talk, Jeff Whelpley demonstrated how you can most effectively leverage all of the awesome tools that are now available in Angular 2 to build ultra-fast, powerful full-stack applications.
  
  

• Modern authentication solutions with OAuth 2.0, OpenId Connect and AngularJS: Nowadays every internet user has numerous passwords for different internet applications. The popular OAuth 2.0 protocol, supported by huge companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, promises to remedy this. This session shows what is behind OAuth 2.0, for which scenarios it is actually intended, where the dangers and challenges lie, and what OpenID Connect has to do with it. It also demonstrates how the standards mentioned can be applied together with AngularJS and UI Router, and the pitfalls of doing so.

• TypeScript tooling for greater productivity: Learn how to be amazingly productive with Angular 2 & TypeScript and how to organise your codebase, build up a development toolchain, and deliver a fast, working application. (This was one of the best presentations I have ever seen!)

 After the conference I read all my notes again and summarised all the items that I don't know much about and will be studying in the next months in my spare time as they are things being used on the market:

• Typescript
• OAuth 2.0
• Zone.js
• Meteor.js
• Node.js
• Ionic.js
• Immutable.js
• Batarangle 

The other sessions are well described here with the slides and videos of the presentation:

http://angularconnect.com/sessions

If you want to talk about any of those come to see / invite me for a coffee. ; )