Front Endgineers Mobile Apps with Ember – April 2015

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On Tuesday evening I tore myself away from the beautiful weather we’re having here in London to attend the latest Front Endgineers meet-up . This month there were two talks lined up, Arnaud Bernard with an introduction to building mobile applications with Ember.js and Jack Franklin helping us get started with ES6 features NOW.

The Skills Matter venue in London again hosted the event and all the tech (this time out) seemed to work without a hitch… and their Lemon & Ginger tea was lovely.

Building Mobile apps with Ember – Arnaud Bernard

Arnaud is currently working with Steethub and gave us a whistle-stop tour of Ember.JS, what he likes about it, and a quick demo of a “messenger.com type app”. He started off by running through a list of things that annoy him when starting out on a new project… things like naming conventions, code styling and which tools to use, or rather having to come up with a group decision on which of those to use.

If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.

– Jim Barksdake (Former CEO of Netscape)

And this is just one thing that Ember.JS helps you out with.

Arnaud took us through some of the cool stuff around ember-cli… really too much for my little notebook so I’ll defer you to their site. One other tip the he shared with us is that if you’re even remotely thinking about using animations then these should be planned in from the start… retrofitting animations into ember.js apps can be a pain.

arnaud

We then saw a quick demo of an app he’s written, a very basic messenger.com clone, that can be run in the desktop, and then with a sprinkling (OK, a truckload) of Cordova magic, also run on an iOS device. Something that I was surprised to hear was that Arnaud believed complex Ember apps would struggle to run well on mobile devices, I suppose this is just based upon my experience with Ionic and how well they run. And speaking of Ionic I did notice that the Ionic CSS and Ionicons were used in the demo… and they looked good 😉

For me Ember.js (and ember-cli) look like tool(s) that I should dig into to learn more … but perhaps at present less pertinent to our current mobile focus. An interesting thing I need to check on though is if anyone is porting Ionic for Ember… now that would be good.

Getting Started with ES6 Modules today – Jack Franklin

I had attended a workshop with Jack last year, and was keen to see how his workflow had come along since his move to GoCardless and was especially eager to see how much ES6 JS could be used in production systems (we’ve been using JavaScript promises for some time without issue thanks to Jake Archibald’s polyfill).

As I had expected Jack was quick to open up Vim and get coding, this was to be talk that needed the demo-Gods in a good mood. I have to be honest that I soon forgot to take notes… all I had noted down was “JSPM… why are we using bower?” and a link to his talk on Github. The gist was this, Jack took us through a simple example app (about 20 lines in total I think) that would fetch a list of public repositories from a user’s github account and then display them. He covered using NPM and JSPM to setup the project in the first place and then using various ES6 features to easily and readably implement the app. As I said, my notes were vague but these were (some of) the ES6 features and other JS tools that he covered;

My take-aways are that the JavaScript world is continuing to move as quickly as ever, and that, just like at MobileCaddy, others are very passionate about removing the boring tasks from developers’ lives… allowing them to create some fantastic apps and providing brilliant experiences.