OttawaJS Panel Discussion

February 2015

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We tried something new at OttawaJS: a panel discussion of the organizers, asking which tools they use and recommend. Our goal was to help new and intermediate developers make sense of the huge number of choices out there.

Some of the key suggestions were:

Start building something. Hello world. Anything.
A lot of the choice is just personal preference.
Choose any one of the frameworks and learn it.
Get to know how frameworks really work behind the magic.
Get involved with the JS community for help and guidance.

Introduction - what do you work on?

What are your favourite beginner resources?

JavaScript: The Good Parts

Eloquent JavaScript

A re-introduction to JavaScript (JS tutorial) - MDN

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide

What's your development environment like?

Editors

Dependency Management

Testing

Alternate syntax

Build tools

JavaScript documentation generators

What front-end frameworks do you use?

"I wrote my own framework"

AngularJS (MVC)

Knockout (MVVM)

Dojo (web components)

What CSS / Visualization framework do you use?

Bootstrap (CSS)

Foundation (CSS)

three.js (WebGL 3D Graphics)

What other tools do you make use of?

JavaScript Source Maps

Bluemix (Cloud hosting)

Source-to-source compilers (ie. coffeescript, opinions for and against)

Modernizr (polyfills)

What back-end frameworks and databases do you use?

Node.js (server-side JS)

Express.js (web app framework)

LoopBack (web app framework)

hapi.js (web app framework)

MongoDB (NoSQL database)

Mongoose ODM (ORM for Mongo)

Redis (key-value database)

CouchDB (database)

What design patterns do you use?

Publish–subscribe pattern

Functional reactive programming

What resources do you recommend for teams?

Github (code repository)

Bitbucket (code repository)

What's on your radar?

WebComponents.org