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360|Stack 2013 – What to remember…

360|Stack is an international 3-day conference in Denver, CO. This inspiring conference covers the development of rich internet applications, on the web, on a desktop or on a mobile device.

After attending last year’s edition, I had the chance to speak at this awesome conference.

This is an overview of what I learned or discovered.

The Apache flex evolution

Since Adobe handed over the Flex SDK to Apache last year, a lot has changed. They were able to release a 4.9 version at the end of 2012, which included a lot of bug fixes and added a handy SDK installer.

During the conference, the new 4.10 version got released with some major changes and a huge amount of bugfixes:

They added datagrid functionality that enables us to lock rows and columns, sort multiple columns and implements keyboard navigation/sorting
There are a bunch of new components and layouts: Accordion, DataAccordion, InlineScroller, AccordionLayout, CarouselLayout, CoverflowLayout, StackLayout, …
Enhanced formatting for currencies, numbers, dates, …

It’s great to see that the Apache Flex project is alive and kicking! Find all the necessary resources on the Apache Flex website.

The Randori framework

Randori combines the power of JavaScript, HTML and CSS with the cross-compiled logic, written in C# or ActionScript. Randori is made for building large scale, single page, JavaScript Applications. You can find demo’s and resources on the Randori Framework website.

In a previous tutorial we’ve already explained how to use existing JavaScript libraries in Randori applications.

Since the last release of the framework and IDE plugin, a lot of features got added (bundled libraries, support for interfaces), which, in my opinion, gives Randori the power to create the applications that the team is aiming for.

KontikiJS

KontikiJS is an ActionScript 3 library created by Renaun. Kontiki will generate a JavaScript implementation of the Flash API when compiled with the Randori compiler.

KontikiJS is not a complete API and focusses on starling based games. Renaun created this fantastic demo which shows the power of the randori compiler.

KontikiJS is available on Github.

webRTC

WebRTC is an open source project that enables Real Time communication between browsers (browser-to-browser) through a JavaScript API.

WebRTC exists out of three major components:

Allowing browsers to access their camera and microphone through the browser.
Enable users to perform audio/video calls between browsers
Enable users to share their data, peer to peer.

Several examples can be found here and here.

Although it’s only supported by the latest versions of Google Chrome and Firefox, there are extensions available to add WebRTC functionality to other browsers, Safari, Opera and IE.

JavaScript utilities

JavaScript is more than a scripting language for website. Using Node.JS and JavaScript a lot people have created an uncountable amount of tools for us, web developers.

These are some of the tools I’ve discovered during this conference:

ExpressJS: Express is a lightweight framework that gives you a lot of HTTP utility methods to create a fast and reliable server and API.
httpster: If you need a quick and easy to use development server, httpster will take care of it.
Stylus, LESS, SASS: These libraries enable you to write CSS on a more Object oriented way. There are differences between all of them, but the general idea stays the same.
Grunt: Grunt is a JavaScript task manager. It automates all the developer’s repetitive tasks (minification, compilation, unit testing,…).

These are just a few example, discover all the available node packages here.

Heroku

Giving your client, a tester, your boss or a friend the opportunity to test a version of your application is a real pain in the ass, if you don’t want to spend time on setting up a host and deploying your application.

Heroku is a cloud service that enables you to deploy your app on the web in no time. You create a heroku space on the command line, push a git repository containing your application to the Heroku service and 5 minutes later your app is ready to use.