Bret Davidson, North Carolina State University Libraries

JavaScript MVC frameworks are ushering in a golden age of robust and responsive web applications that take advantage of evergreen browsers, performant JS engines, and the unprecedented reach provided by billions of personal computing devices. The web browser has emerged as the world’s most popular application runtime and the complexity[1] and scope of JavaScript applications has exploded accordingly. Server-side web frameworks like Rails and Django have helped developers adhere to best practices like modularity, dependency injection, and unit testing for years, practices that are now being applied to JavaScript development through projects like Backbone[2], Ember[3], and Angular[4].

This talk will discuss the issues JavaScript MVC frameworks are trying to solve, common features like data binding, implications for the future of web development[5], and the appropriateness of JavaScript MVC for library applications.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_code [2] http://backbonejs.org [3] http://emberjs.com [4] http://angularjs.org [5] http://tomdale.net/2013/09/progressive-enhancement-is-dead/