The Brexit is coming, the pound sterling is low, and my fellow colleague Erik and I took the opportunity to visit a conference in London before we’ll need a visa for that. It was called FullStack - the conference on JavaScript, Node & Internet of Things and featured, among others, speakers from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.
In this post, I want to share my key takeaways from three very intense conference days.
1. JavaScript is spreading out
An LED sound level meter built within a few hours of JavaScript hacking.
With JavaScript rapidly becoming a language to program the Internet of Things (IoT), quite a few talks at the conference covered topics like remote controlling bluetooth and medical devices, or Virtual Reality. In one of the workshops around minicomputers and microcontrollers, my colleague Erik hacked an LED sound level meter using Node.js on the Tessel 2.
Naturally, in the IoT context security gains more importance, and I attended two interesting advertisements talks on automated code vulnerability scanning with Jacks and protecting your client-side JavaScript with Jscrambler. Both products provide convenient ways for developers to secure their JavaScript applications, without requiring an expertise in the domain of web application security.
2. React still has huge momentum
Just like the other conferences I attended in the last 12 months, FullStack featured the canonical talk by a company that moved from a monolithic [add your current technology here] application to a micro-service based system with a front-end powered by an isomorphic React & Redux app running on NodeJS
In total, there were around half a dozen talks around the NodeJS/React/Redux stack that my team is using for building ePages’ next generation frontend and website editor. One of the most interesting was by Forbes Lindesay from Facebook, who talked about data fetching in React. All in all there was plenty of opportunity to compare notes on that topic with other attendees from the very international audience.
3. This doesn’t mean framework fragmentation is a thing of the past
Can you spot the syntax error on the conference shirt?
Of course there’s enough space for other frameworks in the JavaScript world. Angular 2 was a big topic at FullStack, and after giving it a try in an intense workshop, I was left with the impression that the parts I liked most about it, namely RxJS and TypeScript, are by Microsoft. But it’s good to see that Angular 2 adds server side rendering or Universal JavaScript, and Ember is getting that as well, as pointed out in a keynote by Ember co-creator Yehuda Katz.
JavaScript being JavaScript, there were of course many more framework fights talks, for instance about Meteor, Polymer, and Riot. Mark Rendle gave a humorous wrap-up to this topic in his closing talk “The Things That I Like Are Superior To The Things That You Like”.
About the author
