ForwardJS 3 : A Summary

Yesterady, Ravali Devarapalli and I attended ForwardJS 3, a javascript conference in San Fransisco. Hundreds of developers from around the US came together at the interesting venue: the Regency Ballroom to talk about javascript and the future of web development.

The conference was composed of four “tracks” you could choose from, each with different speakers and topics happening concurrently. Each talk was 40 minutes, which allowed us to get a great grasp on all sorts of new information. I’m going to provide a brief overview of each talk, as well as the aspects of the talk I felt were most important to look into further in the coming weeks.

1. “React: Life without MVC” by Priyatam Mudivarti. 

After arriving after the last coffee was served, our caffeine tanks were on empty, but Priyatam kept us awake with a really interesting topic. He started with an overview of React and how the framework is constructed very differently than other MVC or MV* web frameworks such as Angular. Although his talk was about living without MVC, he stated that there is nothing wrong with MVC, and once you’re used to React it’s very easy to carry over MVC concepts to enhance your application. As a web developer, every 6 months comes a new “cool” framework that you need to convert every code base you’ve ever written to, or else you aren’t accepted by the other cool people. React is that framework right now.

Further looking: Virtual DOM, front end code serialization, front end SQL

2. “Rust + Node = ❤” by Steve Klabnik

Steve is the documentation lead for the new language Rust by Mozilla, and gave a great presentation about how to incorporate Rust into the back end of your web applications. Because Rust is a systems language, the heavy lifting can be completed exponentially faster than back end web languages such as Ruby, Node, PHP etc. He gave a demo exporting regex functionality to a Rust program, and although it was slower than doing it in Node (due to converting the node string into a C string and the traversing of technology layers between rust and node), on a much larger scale it would be a viable approach.

Further looking: write a Rust program

3. “Choosing an Accessible UI Framework” by Gerard K Cohen

As the CTO at Wells Fargo, Gerard must produce software that is accessible to all people. He compared top UI frameworks such as Bootstrap, Foundation and Ionic to find their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to accessibility. The conclusion was that at the moment, there is very poor support for things such as screen readers, but within the next year, accessibility is going to be (and needs to be) a huge focus for web developers.

Further looking: W3 Aria roles, *important* look into making VA fully accessible *important*

4. “Your 3D on the Web” by Nop Jiarathanakul

Nop presented an amazing application he is working on at AutoDesk called the 360 web viewer. Autodesk is the company that makes software like AutoCad and is recently getting into the web space. Their web viewer application allows you to drag and drop over 50 3D file types and view them on the web IN JAVASCRIPT (thank you WebGL). This solves the problem of needing to purchase propriety software to open each and every 3D file type. It is pretty awesome and you really need to check out the demo at this link: http://viewer.autodesk.io/node/gallery/#/viewer?id=551d0768be86fc2c1138b4d4

P.S. It takes a second to load. Check out the “explode” feature

Further looking: 360 Autodesk Viewer 1 line web component API

5. “JS Stacktraces: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” by James Smith

James is the Cofounder and CEO at bug snag, an application used for production error monitoring. He talked about how window.onerror() will catch errors, but wont give you much information about them. From there he built on an example to give a more robust chunk of code to catch errors on all browsers and provide a detailed stack trace. He also shared the link to his company’s entire error catching code base, stating anyone can go steal it if they don’t want to use bugsnag as a platform (reverse psychology?).

Further looking: Production error logging, how to isolate browsers & devices

Overall, forward was a great experience and had definitely improved from the last iteration of the conference. They have one every 6 months and I highly encourage any web developers to attend!