VanJS: Twitter Flight and Web Audio for the Masses

Hey Javascripters,

On Wednesday, August 6th we have two fresh speakers for you at VanJS, so be sure to join us and check it out:

Talk #1

Presenter: Keith Bingman

Twitter: @kbingman (http://twitter.com/kbingman)

Title: Twitter Flight

Summary:

Building modern web applications, particularly Javascript driven single page applications, can quickly devolve in a mess of callbacks and spaghetti code. Recently there has been an explosion of MV* Javascript frameworks to deal with this problem. Backbone, Ember, Angular and many others seek to solve this and become the One True Framework.

But is this really the right approach? Does the highly successful MV* pattern, taken from the server-side framework world, work within the confines of the browser? Sometimes building these applications is harder than it should be.

There is another lighter weight solution few people talk about: Twitter Flight. Designed as a collection of event-driven, stand-alone components, it is both highly flexible and scalable.

A simple set of rules allows Flight to fit where many other frameworks cannot. Each component of the application can either emit or receive an event, but has no other connection to any part of the application. It offers structure, but does not dictate everything about the application and is an alternative to consider when developing or updating any front-end application.

Presenter Bio:

Keith is a front end and Javascript developer, living in Vancouver, BC after 15 years in Southern Germany. Originally a photographer, he started web development over ten years ago building studio sites. He currently specializes in Javascript frameworks and applications and is a Senior Front End Developer at Wantering in Vancouver (http://www.wantering.com).

Talk #2

Presenter: Soledad Penadés

Twitter: @supersole (http://twitter.com/supersole)

Title: Audio for the Masses

Summary:

Where there's mankind, there's music. However, both music schools and musical instruments are expensive, and hard to get access to. But, maybe we can use the power of the web to bring music to more people than ever.

Web Audio enables us to play sound in the browser natively, without using a plug-in. Being able to write audio code in JavaScript lowers the barrier of entry significantly. You just need a browser to get started: no need for expensive equipment or software licenses. The same code works everywhere, and anyone can run it from anywhere in the planet.

What happens when you give powerful tools to people who've never been exposed to the same culture that you've grown with? Can we turn consumers into creators?

Presenter Bio:

By day, Soledad works at Mozilla's Apps Engineering team, building and helping people build Open Web Apps. By evening, night and sometimes dawn, she makes music and things to make more music, or simply listens to music, learns about weird musical instruments, and tries to replicate them with JavaScript.