Unleashing the Web: 3 Things I Learned at FITC Web Unleashed
By Anoop Madhavan
If you are new to Toronto’s tech community like myself, you’ll soon realize that although it is small, it’s very vibrant and active. Last week, on behalf of TribalScale, I participated in the 2-day Web Unleashed Conference targeted at Front-end and Full-stack engineers. It was a great opportunity to network with like-minded techies and learn about a variety of topics. Some of the topics that were covered included the W3C speech APIs, what’s new with the HTTP/2 protocol, how React works and its benefits, building Node Microservices with Docker and Swarm, and the list goes on. For the purposes of this blog, I’ll only be discussing and recapping three of those topics.
W3C Speech API
The W3C Speech API Community Group published the Web Speech API specification, and at the event we got a detailed presentation on how it actually works. The APIs support speech recognition and text-to-speech features right in a web browser. Currently it’s only supported by Chrome and Firefox (needs to be enabled using the media.webspeech.recognition.enable and media.webspeech.synth.enabled flags in about:config). Chrome currently supports over 70+ languages and their variants.
Speech recognition and text-to-speech gives the users, especially those with barriers to traditional screen interfaces, the chance to provide and receive information from a website. It would also let users interact with a page while driving without taking their eyes off the road.
Given speech is a predominant mode of communication for humans, it has a natural potential for a lot of future products, apps & IoT devices. For more information, see the annyang library! It lets you add speech recognition to your site by relying on browser speech APIs and let users interact with your web app through voice commands.
What’s New with HTTP/2 Protocol?
We do a lot of things to improve performance of web apps and mobile applications by caching, compression, domain sharding, image optimization, minification of content, etc. It’s great to see that positive performance for the end-user, network and server is taken into consideration in the HTTP/2 specifications. HTTP/2 is supported by most of the modern browsers.
HTTP/2 is binary so it’s more compact and efficient. Also, it only uses one connection per server, instead of one connection per file request. It also compresses the header data with HPACK algorithm. All these improvements help enhance the web app performance and user experience.
How React Works and What Makes it Fast
Ever since DOM was introduced, it was advised to avoid DOM updates as it has performance implications (it’s expensive to repaint and reflow). As a result, engineers had to spend a lot of time trying to avoid large changes and stick to smaller ones. For large changes, you would have to detach DOM, make changes and then reattach, which was a painful process for many.
React completely changed the dynamics and solves a lot of these problems. It uses virtual DOM diffing to identify the nodes that have changed and updates only those parts. Engineers also don’t need to think much about event delegation as React listens for all events at the top level using a single event listener. Then, it maintains internal mapping to all the event handlers associated to the components, which are added or removed whenever components are mounted or unmounted.
It might be the end of an era for jQuery and Backbone but with powerful tools like React and React-native, JavaScript will definitely go a very long way in the world of web and mobile!
Key Takeaways
I hope to see more topics on security, and more in-depth sessions on performance and accessibility in future Web Unleashed Conferences and similar events.
I would highly recommend these types of tech events to tech professionals in Toronto. It’s a valuable learning experience and a great way to connect with industry leaders and professionals who share similar interests.
If you still need another reason to attend, there’s also an after party! This year it was hosted at SPiN by us, TribalScale! We had a great time participating at the Web Unleashed Conference from start to finish and can’t wait for the next one.
Anoop Madhavan is a Tech Lead at TribalScale with 13+ years of experience in software engineering and worked at companies, including PayPal, Intuit and Yahoo!
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