Slides from Álvaro Sánchez-Mariscal talk @Codemotion Roma 2014

1. Embrace the front-end
revolution
Álvaro Sánchez-Mariscal
Web Architect —
@alvaro_sanchez

2. About me
• Passionate software developer.
• Worked at IBM BCS, BEA Systems and
Sun Microsystems.
• Founded Salenda in 2005.
• Working now at Odobo as Web Architect.
• Living between Madrid and Gibraltar.

3. • HTML5 games platform for:
• Game developers.
• Casinos.
• Check out https://play.odobo.com and try
for free!

4. The front-end
revolution from a
human resources
perspective.

5. Full-stack Frameworks

6. Monolithic!

7. Monolithic frameworks
• The views and the business logic are
packaged together.
• Server-side generated views.
• Full-stack frameworks require full-stack
developers.

8. The full-stack developer
Can write code on
every layer of the
application.

9. Q: How do you see
yourself as a
developer?
http://poll.fm/4qjo0

10. • Great if they are really full-stack.
• Not so good if they are back-end
developers, with some jQuery knowledge
and pixel-up-down-ok CSS skills.
• Makes less sense when your company has
truly front-end developers.
Full-stack developers

11. The front-end revolution

12. The front-end
revolution facts
• Javascript community is HUGE. Lot of
developers out there.
• NodeJS is the new framework for
hipsters.
• There is a lot of tools built with/around
NodeJS/Javascript.

14. Tools a front-end
developer will love

15. The front-end
revolution from an
architectural
perspective.

16. REST

17. REST is much
more than just
returning
JSON.

18. RESTful is aboutRESTful is about*
Client / server.
Stateless.
Cacheable.
Layered.
* Source: Wikipedia.

19. Statelessness
• Full-stack frameworks are usually
stateful.
• They use the HTTP session.
• “ST” in REST stands for State Transfer.
• Client needs to transfer its state on each call.

20. Break down your apps
• Separate the front-end from the back-
end.
• Front: a pure Javascript/HTML/CSS
application.
• Back-end: a REST API.

21. Break down your apps

22. Break down your apps

23. Advantages
• Single Page Applications are more
responsive.
• All the page changes are in the browser.
• UI and API are deployed separately.
• You can redeploy as many times as you want,
to do A/B testing, for example.

24. Advantages
• Scalability.
• It’s way more easier to scale pure Javascript
applications.
• Separation of responsibilities.
• Developers can concentrate on making each
tier a robust and secure system.

25. Advantages
• You get ready from the beginning to
expose an API. Can be useful for
• Public consumers.
• Mobile applications.
• Back-office applications.

26. Demo
http://bit.ly/grails-angular

27. Conclusions
• Think whether your team/company has
full-stack developers or not.
• Think if the teams need to scale.

28. Conclusions
• From a RESTful point of view, you need to
achieve statelessness.
• For that, you need to avoid server-centric,
full-stack frameworks.
• Break down your applications into a truly
Javascript front-end + REST API.

29. Álvaro Sánchez-Mariscal
Web Architect —
@alvaro_sanchez
Grazie mille!