JavaScript Grievances / Web Components

Meetup starts at 6:30pm, with 30 minutes of social time. Beginning at 7pm, Mark Volkmann (http://java.ociweb.com/mark/) will present JavaScript Grievances:

Mark will walk us through a list of twenty or so of the most common complaints about JavaScript. The point is to show that few of them are serious issues. Most fall into these categories:

Don't occur in practice Are avoided by using linting tools Are addressed in ES6 Aren't real issues After a short break, Matt Follett (http://www.linkedin.com/in/mfollett) will give us an introduction to Web Components:

According to the W3C, "Web Components (http://www.w3.org/TR/components-intro/) enable Web application authors to define widgets with a level of visual richness and interactivity not possible with CSS alone, and ease of composition and reuse not possible with script libraries today."

Open source projects such as Google Polymer (http://www.polymer-project.org/) and Mozilla's X-Tag (http://x-tags.org/) are bringing this proposed set of standards to the browsers of today in the form of layered polyfill libraries; and some of the bleeding edge browser builds (https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/canary.html) already feature native implementations of several pieces, including HTML Imports (http://www.w3.org/TR/html-imports/) and Custom Elements (http://www.w3.org/TR/custom-elements/).

Starting about 8:30pm, we'll move into a hacking session to experiment with the material that's been presented, and with JavaScript and Node.js in general.

Bitovi (http://bitovi.com/) will be sponsoring complementary sodas and sandwiches, and you're welcome to BYOB, so come hungry, come thirsty, bring your laptop and be ready to code!