Frozen Rails Talk Proposal Template (http://2012.frozenrails.eu/)

speaker.md

Jan Krutisch

Contact details

• Email: jan@krutisch.de
• Twitter: @halfbyte
• Website or Blog: http://jan.krutisch.de/speaking.html

Speaker bio

Jan Krutisch, after being one of the founding members of the german rails community went on to write a book on the subject in 2006 and then built countless web applications for the hamburgian mindmatters.de before going freelance in 2012. He feels at home in ruby, python, javascript, css and html. He currently builds mobile web apps for a few german publishers and builds a secret startup imperium in the backyard.

talk.md

Talk title

• Desired talk duration: 30 or 45 minutes

Abstract

"Single page apps" are all the rage - apps that use MVC JavaScript frameworks and a simple REST based API on the server side (if at all) to persists data are popping up all over the place and are especially popular as a relatively simple way of developing responsive and highly interactive mobile web applications.

Enough of the buzzword bingo.

Building single page apps comes with a whole new set of problems that are to solve: JS side templating and where to store the templates, how to create apps that are both working as single page apps and are indexable by the mighty google bot. Also: Testing.

People are also often forgetting how much more complex rich client applications can get and that you are suddenly dealing with several completely new problem classes you haven't really faced when building more traditional request/response based web apps.

So, in the end it is a question of knowing (which is, as we know, half the battle). Know your target audience, know your problem space and make a conscious, well informed decision. My talk is hopefully helping with that.

Notes

I've given a variation of this talk at RailsWayCon 2012, where it was very well received. You can take a look at my slides (these would obviously change and improve for FR) and read a more in-depth discussion about the topics at my blog.