Sundering Your Web Apps With Lineman.js

Justin Searls | 01:30 – 02:45

Abstract

In the past few years, we’ve watched JavaScript interpreters and libraries mature, CSS preprocessors emerge, and even witnessed “HTML 5” manage to break through the public’s collective consciousness. As developers, we’ve started to realize that there can be numerous benefits to separating concerns by segregating our client & server code such that they only communicate via an API.

So why do our web frameworks still subordinate our client-side code to a subdirectory of our server-side project? Why don’t they support CoffeeScript or Less/Sass? Why is it still so hard to deploy concatenated and minified JS & CSS to production? Not to mention JavaScript testing—why is that so awkward to set up?

We struggled with these questions too, and that’s why we wrote Lineman. Lineman is a Node.js-based project build tool that’s specifically designed to address all of the above front-end concerns, whether you’re writing code, running in CI, or deploying to production.

In this talk we’ll give you a sense for how tools like Lineman can improve your productivity and happiness by helping you finally treat your client-side code as a first class citizen!

Speaker

Justin Searls has two professional passions: writing great software and sharing what he’s learned in order to help others write even greater software. He recently co-founded a new software studio called Test Double, where he’s currently helping clients build well-crafted user experiences for the web.