EmberConf 2015 Day 1

Opening Keynote: Tom Dale and Yehuda Katz

• To kick off the conference Tomster joined Tom Dale and Yehuda Katz on stage!
• @mixonic@ef4@mmun were welcomed as new members to the Ember Core Team
• Big thanks to Robert Jackson @rwjblue!!!!

Ember 2014 in Review

• Rapid Release worked great! 6 week release cycle to get new features into everyone’s hands.

HTMLBars

<a href={{url}}>

instead of

<a {{bindAttr href="url"}}> 

• Block parameters, faster and lower memory, validation for templates
• Killed metamorphs!
• Improvements to Ember Inspector including Ember Data and promises pane, render performance tab, multiple <iframe>s, and redesigned UI, to name a few.

Ember CLI

• Single install command for Addons, test support, massive performance improvements, and API stubbing, and server proxy (the list goes on!).

Testing Ecosystem

• handles asynchrony

Ember Data

• Relationship syncing, async relationships - built with async loading in mind.
• Adapter Ecosystem

That was last year, what’s next?

• Versioned Guides – live today!
• Next Version of Ember CLI (as of last night)
• Engines
• List View
• Components (already in Canary)
• Liquid Fire
• Async and Routable Components
• Ember Data: JSON API support out of the box
• Pagination and Filtering
• Shipping Ember Data 1.0
• 6/12 release date for Ember 2.0, Ember Inspector, Ember CLI, LiquidFire, etc.

Ember.js Performance by Stefan Penner

@stefanpenner

• Important choices to make, how to make the right choices?
• Time vs. Space
• Things that are costly in space: closures, objects, non-optimized code, compiled code, excess shape allocations
• In Ember.js, need to do less work, align with primitives

Mis-alignment #1

Problem: Ember does too much work.

Solution: do less

• Actions up, bindings down, no two-way bindings, explicit data flow
• RIP singleton controllers, explicit lifecycle

Mis-alignment #2

Problem: init and super are hard to learn and mis-aligned with ES2015

Solution: Embrace super

• Explicit defaults in super
• Don’t set properties until super
• When to call _super(): When overwriting a framework method before touching this

Mis-alignment #3

Problem: Ember.Object.reopen, buggy, complex internals, massive allocations & shapes

Solution: Limit reopen to before first instantiation

• Meta is a good thing. Every class has a meta, every instance has a meta. Metas for instances are what kill us. Meta is “live” inheriting. If can limit reopen, can make all metas one shape.
• meta.listeners is crazier
• Solution: work with V8 to make things better

Designing for Ember Apps by Steve Trevathan

@strevat

• Mental models: Understand where the user is coming from and what kinds of interactions they deal with
  • “What I think the thing is”
  • Influenced by experiences from the past
  • Not always solid: can be updated and changed. (improvements)
• 2 types of mental models
  • Macro: what I think it is from a distance.
  • Micro: how I think each individual interaction works; the specific feature.
• Build a framework of understanding
  • Some apps are just too complicated
  • Use explicitly if they apply
  • Break mental models if it improves the experience

Design Patterns

#1 Gradual Engagement

• Core value given for free. Eventually you may be asked to sign up.

#2 Skeleton UI

• ex. Google maps: grid becomes fully rendered map.

#3 Carry Context

• ex. rdio: music played on laptop is reflected on iPad (or other devices).

#4 Reuse Core Interactions

• ex. Browsing Pinterest: provides click and follow tangent.
• Micro becomes Macro; core interactions become a symbol of your app.
• “When I go home and think of your app, I think of the experience, the micro features more than the macro ones.”

#5 Offline Mode

• ex. Google Docs: “trying connect” message and can’t interact with document. Incredibly Frustrating.

Tools of the Trade

• A free design pattern library for Ember apps.

Hijaking Hacker News with Ember.js by Godfrey Chan

@chancancode

• Being a canadian is awesome

Hijacking Hacker News App

• Browser extension that transforms old site design to new, more usable app
• Runs in hacker news domain

Getting the Data

• $.get("/news').then(): request html page, extract data, then manipulate
• Hacker News HTML Scrapper: need adapter to help talk to Ember Data store; customize adapter and serializer.

Fixing the URLs

• Hacker News urls are not ideal for building an Ember app.
• HN urls (serialized App States) to Ember Router (Actual App States)
  • trick Ember into seeing URLs that are different from what is in the address bar
• Router location types: Ember.HistoryLocation vs. Ember.HashLocation
  • Can use same mechanism to make a custom Ember.Location: App.HackerNewsLocation = Ember.Location.extend()

Preferences

• Changing preferences in one place and can see changes reflected in other
  • Use observer pattern

The Possibilities

• What if your ideas do not line up with the framework’s choices?
• If the frameworks is doing it’s job, than the possibilities should be endless!

The Art of Ember App Deployment by Luke Melia

@lukemelia

• Need to adjust deployment techniques from “server app” days
• When traffic starts routing to the new app, finger-printed assets can no longer be accessed
  • Need to keep old and new finger printed assets for a few minutes after a deploy.

Versioning

• Learn from native apps - phones run different versions of an app
• Keep API working for older clients through API versioning

Deployment & serving strategy

• HTML page should be managed and deployed as part of static asset deployment process
• HTML page should be served by the API server
• Preview before activating
• A/B Testing
  • Setting global flags based on A/B buckets
  • Serving up wholly different HTML based on A/B bucket
• Notify connected clients

The New ember-cli-deploy

• Merged these three projects: ember-deploy, front-end-builds, ember-cli-deploy
• Now, one project with 6 maintainers (and growing!)

Roadmap

• Release 0.4.0 by the end of this week!
• Reelease 0.5.0
  • New pipeline hooks and plugins architecture
  • Includes post-deploy hook
  • Documentation for plugin developers
  • ember-cli-front-end-builds becomes a plugin
  • USAGE: ember deploy staging
• Beyond 0.5.0: deployment to named buckets, support A/B tests, beta testing, etc.

Ambitious UX for Ambitious Apps by Lauren Tan

@poteto

Good Design is:

* how it works
* reactive
* playful
* informative

• Designing the product vs. designing the experience
• You are not the same as your website users

Good Design is Reactive

• Instant feeback
• Flow of data and maintaining relationships between that data
• Ember allows reactivity through the observer pattern

The Observer Pattern

• Computed properties transform properties and keep relationships in sync
• Computed Property Macros to keep things DRY.
  • Ember ships with a bunch of these out of the box (map, mapBy, concat, etc)
• Observers synchronously invoked when dependent properties change

Good design is playful

• Has personality
• Ex. Slack when you open app (fun messages)

Good Design is Informative

• Visibility of System Status
  • Jakob Nielson - 10 heuristics for User Interface Design
• Ex. Flash messages
  • ember-cli-flash

Good Design is Intuitive

• Drag and drop (trello, Google Calendar, etc…)
• Ember handles drag and drop events out of the box
  • add draggable=true to any html element to make it draggable

Bring Sanity to Frontend Infastructure with Ember by Sam Selikoff

@samselikoff

How Ember Can Help Today:

• Ember and Ember CLI helps infastructure by reducing boilerplate
• Similar directory structure and architecture
• Conventions: eliminate trivial differences that hold us back
• Writing add-ons for shareable code. Allows us to build structure.
• Use ember deploy to deploy apps. Auth and backend config work into separate deploy server.
• Testing in Ember using ember test. QUnit provides helpers.
• Identify redundancies and abstractions

How Ember Can Help Tomorrow:

• Semantic versioning and CLI conventions
• Flexibility
• New standards and best practices
  • generally, shared solutions/frameworks help identify and discover ways of improving applications
  • Ember always keeps up to date with these best practices
• “Ember is not just a framework, it’s a philosophy” of how to create and improve software
  • First, give real developers the tools to tinker
  • Then, deliberately fold in shared solutions

In summary, innovate & share!

Dynamic Graphic Composition In Ember by Chris Henn

@chnn

Spliting a Statistical Graphic into Parts

• Splitting a problem allows us to change one feature of the graphic at a time
• Suggests the aspects of a plot that are possible to change
• Encourages custom visualizations for every data situation
• Demo: Scatterplot example

  • Adds multiple regression lines (in example, based on # of cylinders of each car)

    {{#each subset as |subset|}}
      // component
    {{/each}}
    

  • Each point in the graph is an svg circle

Grammer of Graphics by Hadley Wickham

(Book of guidlines to follow)

• Data to Aesthetic Mappings
• Scales: one per Asthetic mapping
  • Each data to aesthetic mapping has some mapping function
  • he has chosen to represent these as points in scatterplot example
• Layers: geom, stat, optional data to aesthetic mapping
• Coordinate System
• Faceting

What does this look like using Ember?

• Data to Aesthetics = outer layer component which takes in the data as params
• Scales = computed properties (using computer property macros)
• Layers = looks like top level component, but must pass the scales

Further Considerations

• Interactivity
• Animations and transitions
  • performance (updating graphic many times per second)

Test-Driven Development By Example by Toran Billups

@toranb

Live coding!!

• Red, green, refactor
  • You get a lot of feedback from red (so it can be red, red, red, green, refactor)
• Incorrect selector in template to make sure you’re doing it correctly (aka. test should fail)
• Test should not be very layout dependent
  • Should be more general and not break whenever you make template changes that do not change app functionality.
• Test names should be descriptive
• Testing computed properties is recommended because of how caching works with them. Failing test will let you know which properties should be observed in order to break the cache.
• Design proof testing

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