JavaScript Open Day : London June 2015

A couple of the Parallax development team spent last Friday at the Javascript Open Day , a London based conference hosted by Microsoft.

This was a packed one day event at the St James Theatre in central London, aimed at exploring state of the art Javascript. It touched on the tools we can use, the tools we should use, what perhaps isn’t quite consumer-ready, and even what the distant future holds for the most prevalent programming language in the world.

Key Note
The event kicked off with a fantastic Key Note from the much respected Christian Heilmann, a long term Mozilla employee who is now an Evangelist at Microsoft. He set the scene for the day with a great sense of humour, touching on the incredible capabilities and fast-moving nature of modern Javascript, without letting us forget its unusual past, and the sometimes circuitous route it took to get where it is today.

Screencast: Innovation vs. Impatience – keynote at #JSOpenDay London 2015 https://t.co/QNO0P8Tufx – slides: http://t.co/pgGZZk1oOw

— Christian Heilmann (@codepo8) June 27, 2015

ES6 Now: The Good, The Bad and The Hype
He then kicked us off on the first talk of the day, ‘ES6 Now: The Good, The Bad and The Hype’ which came from Andrea Giammarchi, currently a developer at Twitter. Andrea delivered a quick, but impressively thorough walkthrough of the key features of ECMAScript 6, the recently ratified ‘next’ version of Javascript. He dove headfirst into an explanation of arrow functions, modules, classes, new array operators and more, explaining how we can use all of these new tools today through the use of transpilers , and whether these features are all they’re cracked up to be.

Fusile
This was followed up by an unusual presentation from Peter Müller of Citrix. Peter started out with the much-repeated story of frustration at the complex build chain and various tools used in modern web development, touching on the difference between something being ‘easy’, and ‘simple’, and how we should strive for the latter in our development environments. He went on to demo Fusile, his own attempt at simplifying the build process. Whilst still very much an alpha piece of software, it’s an interesting attempt at removing some of the unnecessary cruft we have become accustomed to in web development.

Micrsoft’s Event Hubs
Next up was Bianca Furtuna, a Microsoft Evangelist who discussed the difficulties of dealing with the sheer quantity of data produced by the billions of devices we use every day. As a Microsoft sponsored event, it’s no surprise that she also touched on Event Hubs, Microsoft’s data ingestion service aimed at tackling these problems.

Installable Web Apps
This was followed by ‘Installable Web Apps’, from Andreas Bovens and Martin Kern , a talk which very much did what it says on the tin. We saw how websites could be built and compiled to various installable formats, enabling a native-esque experience on Windows and mobile platforms. He also touched on some interesting integrations with the Office suite.

Following a quick lunch at a local pub (which we definitely didn’t wash down with a pint), we returned for the afternoon sessions.

The Toxic Side of Free
This started with a less technologically oriented, and indeed rather sombre talk from Remy Sharp . Remy is the creator and maintainer of http://jsbin.com, the first collaborative javascript sandbox site. His talk, ‘The toxic side of free’, discussed the personal difficulties of offering and maintaining a free service on the web, and how systematic abuse from less respectable members of the internet community can leave a sour taste in your mouth.

Predicting the Future with Azure Machine Learning
Amy Nicholson another Microsoft Evangelist then delivered her talk on ‘Predicting the future with Azure Machine Learning.’ This was relatively impressive, and Amy demoed a rather intuitive UI for building and sharing machine learning algorithms and results, which has inspired the Parallax team to consider implementing machine learning into our own solutions.