Complex Grammar Cases in JavaScript

IMPORTANT: Due to new local city regulations, we must park at another Facebook lot and take shuttle buses to Building 15. Please arrive early! Traffic in that area is s-l-o-w. Go to the address shown here, use the free valet parking, and look for the Gold Line shuttle. IMUG buses to MPK15 will run every 15 minutes from 6 to 7:15 PM. We cannot guarantee late arrivals will have other options, but you can try to work with the valet service to get to MPK15 (or contact us via Meetup messaging though it's unlikely we will be available at that point). After the event, return shuttles will run every 15 minutes, 8:15 to 9:15 PM.

As usual we'll do networking from 6:30 - 7 PM, and after the talk as time allows. No webcast. No word yet on whether we'll be able to record this.

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About this talk:

A Framework for Supporting Complex Grammar Cases Across Languages in JS

Writing UI in a way such that text can be accurately translated often comes with tradeoffs. If the text is sufficiently complicated, engineers have to take great pains (write many conditionals, which they often get wrong) to ensure it is accurately rendered in other languages. Additionally, engineers are often either required to (a) keep strings separate from UI, or (b) keep translatable text simple enough to be extracted from UI source.

Fbt is an explicit markup language that tackles complexity and keeps UI text bundled with the relevant source code. This has the added benefit of keeping UI source self-documenting. This markup is parsed at build-time and the text is collected and sent to translators. The framework enables engineers to write text that would normally be tedious and error-prone in a succinct and accurate way. For example, writing numbers that cover the plural cases correctly is a simple matter of using the < fbt:plural > tag. We’ll be open sourcing our JavaScript framework, fbt, very soon. This is a preview of that framework.

About the speaker:

John Watson has been at Facebook for nearly 6 years and has been working on the i18n team at Facebook for the last 3 years. He is well-known internally as an expert on multiple complex JS frameworks and is the engineer who brought the magic of fbt markup to JavaScript engineers at Facebook and is responsible for its open source release. The i18n server-side infrastructure at Facebook was one of the first things that had impressed him when he first joined Facebook, and this was what inspired him to bring a similar developer experience to the JavaScript codebase.

How to attend:

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Many thanks to Iris Orriss, Whitney Fox, and Facebook for hosting this talk!

The hashtag for IMUG events is #IMUG408, honoring Silicon Valley's main area code. Yes, we'll be in 650 this month, which used to be 415. It's still 408! :-) Follow @i18n_mug: http://twitter.com/i18n_mug