JS Fundamentals

Who is Michael Cole?

Wide Range of Experience

• 10 years in corporate
• 10 years freelance
• 2 yrs Digital Nomad
• Fullstack + DevOps

Traveled working remotely. 

• Learned to surf in Ecuador
• Learned Spanish in Colombia
• SCUBA instructor and guide
• Entrepreneur in Thailand

Talented devs name their terms.

Code is everywhere.

Most people select options.

Programmers *make* choices.

Welcome :-)
Hard work and constant learning.

How the Web Works

Firehose Lecture - 30 mins

Variables, Logic, Funtions

Interactive Lecture - 1 hr

Practice Practice Practice

Rest of the day

How the Web Works

pre-1993 - Dialup BBS

Have your computer call your friends computer.  Every BBS was an island.

Essentially same as today: email, chat, downloads, and games.

Web Browser History

1993 - Before Mosaic

Lynx (text based http)

Gopher (before http)

Email (no spam yet), and ...

1993 - After Mosaic

IE 1 (Mosaic Rebranded)

Mosaic

Web Browser History

The First Browser Wars

Internet Explorer

Netscape

Firefox

1996 - 2009

Microsoft licensed Netscape, then gave away IE for free by bundling with Windows.

Netscape created the Mozilla Foundation, and Firefox to promote web standards.

Different Browsers had different scripting languages.  Netscape (now Mozilla) proposed JavaScript as ECMAScript Standard in 1997

1996

2009

Web Browsers

1996 - 2009

Web Applications were incredibly hard.  

Each browser was different: Scripting, DOMs, CSS

Write for one browser, then `port` to others.

Firefox won because of standards and the Firebug debugger

jQuery began to standardize

The Second Browser War

2009 - Present

IE

FF

Chrome

• Developers wanted standards and features.
• Users suffered.  
• Web applications were Slow.
• Thin front-end

Google in 2009

Why use Chrome?

• People use IE because it's already installed
• People use Firefox because it's "web standards"
• Why will people use Google Chrome?

• Open Source: Chromium

• Better Dev Tools than Firebug

• Super fast "V8" JS Engine (which became Node.js)

Modern Web

• JavaScript everywhere

• Multiple supported browsers

• Standards based

• http://caniuse.com
   

• "responsive" Mobile Designs

• http://getbootstrap.com

Web Servers?

1990:  Document web

• Apache web server.

• Documents - HTML / CSS / Images

• Semantic structure

• Server Side Includes for headers/footers

• Today called "static site generators"

Example: http://powma.com

2000: Single Server Web

• Java - Enterprise Web App

• PHP - "Pretty good Home Page" - commodity hosting

Dynamic Pages, often starting from one file.

One Server for all requests.

Example:  http://wikipedia.org

Problems:  It does not scale.  Not interactive. Impossible chat server problem.

2010: Multi-Server Web

• DevOps, Heroku - the Stateless Server

• Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, Symfony

• Content Management Systems

• Beginning of the "Cloud"

• jQuery - front-end bling, still HTML

"Stateless" Web servers, separate databases

Databases start to scale with replication.

Example:  http://whitehouse.gov

Problem:  Still Hard to scale.

2014: Modern Web

• Single Page App:  MEAN stack

• Servers evolve REST API's.  

• Front-end/back-end split. The Browser becomes it's own application.

  • JavaScript framework on Front-end
  • Node.js / Express on Back-end
  • Document Databases in Production

Example:  https://app.humongous.io

Problem:  It's complicated :-)  Also, there's never been more opportunity to learn.

JS - The most installed language

• Lighter weight than Java / .NET

• Faster than PHP

• Asynchronous - like the web

• NPM Package Manager

• One language for web client+server

• Embedded scripting (NodeBots)

• Actively Developed (ES6 & 7)

http://alpha.ideavis.co/529cc5f/?utm_content=bufferd15ac&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

Variables, Logic, Funtions

Interactive Lecture - 1 hr

The Console

Write and run JS line by line

Open Browser (Chrome of FF)

Right click anywhere

Inspect Element

Click Console

Make it big, we'll be here awhile

Variables

A place to keep your stuff

x = 'hello world'

Expressions

Resolve to a single value

x = 'hey there,'

x + ' you look great!'

x === 'goodbye world'

Conditional Statements

Doing things at the right time

// This is a comment

x = 'morning';  // Assignment

if (x === 'morning') {  // Comparison

   console.log(x + ' coffee');

   console.log('breakfast');

} else {  /* part of if/else */

   console.log('snack');

}

else if

Sequential tests

hour = 11;
if (hour < 9) {

  alert('breakfast');
} else if(hour > 12) {

  alert('lunch');

} else {

  alert('brunch');
};

Function Declaration

Making a Recipe

function whatsNow(x) {  //  A Parameter

  if (x === 'morning') {

     console.log(x + ' coffee');

     console.log('breakfast');

  } else {

     console.log('snack');

  }
}

Function Calls

Baking a Cake from a Recipe

whatsNow('morning');  // an argument
whatsNow('afternoon');



console.log(whatsNow);  // What?!

Function Calls

Returning a value

function howManyChars(x) {
  return x.length;
};
howManyChars('hello moon');

Taking off the training wheels

Too much code for the console

http://jsbin.com/bovinu/2/edit?js,console

http://jsbin.com/tagaru/1/edit?js,console

Global Scope Bad

Everyone hates it:

• It causes bugs

• It looks amateurish

• Trolls will troll you

• The mind can hold ~25 lines of code

What did we miss?

• ES6 has block scope with `let`
• http://stackoverflow.com  register
• http://github.com  register
• operator precedence javascript mozilla
• arrays
• objects

It's over!  
Firehose off