Read our latest: The year so far & 1.0 update.
It's been a busy two weeks. First we had FutureJS in Barcelona where we ran a work workshop and gave a talk on How to Build Front-End Web Apps that Scale. Then we were exhibiting at ScotlandJS and also spoke about our experiences of Testing Ginormous JavaScript Apps. Finally, we've release BRJS v0.8. As we said, a busy two weeks!
In the Open Sourcing Stats blog post we stated that running workshops was a great way for us to get feedback and that our first one was going to be at FutureJS. Well, our first How to Build Front-End Web Apps that Scale workshop was a success.
The workshop was sold out with 20 attendees and the feedback we've got so far has been very positive.
We used Typeform, who were FutureJS
sponsors, to capture the results
We've published the Workshop Exercises so in theory you could work through them - if you try to do so any need any help please get in touch as it's likely it'll be missing a few things we directly provided when running it in person.
If you're interested in us coming to your event or company and running the workshop please get in touch.
The next planned run through of the workshop in San Francisco at ForwardJS. If you'll be in SF on 24th July 2014 hopefully you'll be able to make it!
Image from FutureJS Blog
At FutureJS we gave a general talk on How to Build Front- End Web Apps that Scale - we weren't expecting to be speaking, but were asked if we could after another speaker dropped out. A great opportunity, not to be missed!
We've given similar talks elsewhere, but the talk content continues to change as we discover what resonates most with attendees and continue to learn strategies and practices for building large scale front-end web apps. This version of the talk was very general and didn't talk specifically about BladeRunnerJS. We'll be sure to post a link to the video once it's published but for now you can view the How to Build Front-End Web Apps that Scale - FutureJS slides on slideshare.
Okay, @BladeRunnerJS seems pretty legit -- @leggetter talking about lots of challenges we also face at FB @futurejs
— Pete Hunt (@floydophone) May 3, 2014One of the highlights for us was that, although we're convinced that what we do is applicable outside of building large financial HTML5 web trading apps, we need to prove this. So, it was great when Pete Hunt, who's currently heading up the web engineering team at Instagram, tweeted at us and then later headed over to chat about how Facebook are solving similar problems with their web front-end.
My man @leggetter @futurejs pic.twitter.com/nMIC1QCXAO
— Pete Hunt (@floydophone) May 3, 2014
Photo taken by the awesome Tony Blank.
Yes, that's a dinosaur!
With two of the BladeRunnerJS Team based in Scotland we wanted to get involved at ScotlandJS.
Andy Berry in early and manning
the BladeRunnerJS stand at ScotlandJS
So, as well as sponsoring and taking a booth we submitted a talk as part of the CFP event process. And we were very pleased that it was chosen by those who bought the first batch of tickets.
This time we spoke about Testing Ginormous JavaScript Apps. With a codebase consisting of 1679 JS (250k+ lines of code), 231 HTML templates and 386 CSS files we believe we're in a good position to talk about the problems we've come up against and how we've solved them, when building Ginormous JavaScript Apps.
This talk was also recorded and we'll share when it's ready. The Testing Ginormous JavaScript Apps - ScotlandJS slides are available on slideshare (Featuring Dinosaurs!).
Last - but not least - we've released v0.8.
As part of the open sourcing process we took a branch of the code and removed any internally focused functionality - anything that we believe was only related to Caplin Trader(CT) application development; any CT specific functionality has been moved out to be a BRJS plugin.
Over the past few weeks the CT team have been looking at using the open source BRJS releases so we've been helping them with any integration problems. This focus has resulted in v0.8 containing mainly backwards compatibility fixes.
We have made some progress towards making it easier to add libraries to BladeRunnerJS applications, but there is still some work to be done there.
For v0.9 our main focus will be to add support for Flat File Deployment so that BRJS apps can easily be deployed to any hosting environment i.e. GitHub pages or any CDN.
If you've already tried out BladeRunnerJS and have some feedback or if you decide to give it a try after reading this please get in touch.