DeveloperWeek Austin: Impressions and Advances

DeveloperWeek Austin, the largest developer conference in this area, has grown more than 2x over the inaugural event held last year and took place at the fresh Palmer Events Center. This year’s event had more than 2,000 developers and engineers, over 80 speakers, 100+ workshops, talks and sessions, and 30 exhibitors featuring over 20 product categories of developer & engineering technologies. We saw attendance across executives, engineers, software architects and technical managers from Fortune 500, mid-market and startup companies. We at Sencha were happy to be part of the crowd!

And freshness was in the air, too: the heat of a late fall gave way to what passes for a cold front in Central Texas, where the majority of the DeveloperWeek crowd consumed Texas’ finest in food – mostly Tex-Mex and BBQ, or trade show sandwiches on the exhibit floor.

Many of these sessions were more than full – it was often SRO (standing room only) in a town noted for live music and innovative software. One of the best attended was Sencha’s Marc Gusmano, who delivered a talk on the topic, “Breathe New Life into your Existing JavaScript Components with Web Components.” This talk was particularly interesting, as Marc shared how Free and Open Source Frameworks (F.O.S.S.) like React, Angular, and Vue can help lead you to the bright future of web components. The web components specification works in most modern web browsers, and the browser does the heavy-lifting for you – it understands components, rendering, and so on. Light on the sales pitch and heavy on “here’s why you want to do this”, Marc delivered a terrific explanation of where the future is going.

Sencha Solutions Architect Marc Gusmano and Senior Marketing Manager Casey Crowder answered attendee questions in a busy booth at Developer Week.

The theatre was buzzing when Marc said, “… JavaScript can be used for Front-end development; Mobile, Tablet and Desktop development; Cloud backends; IoT Devices; and Service Oriented Architectures … you can use your favorite components in Angular and React by building to the components specification of these frameworks.”

The real payoff to me, as a Developer, was that these frameworks can interoperate with each other, and that Sencha’s professional-grade, commercially-supported, feature rich Ext JS, ExtReact, (and soon ExtAngular) products make this easy to do. I can take the best of whatever works and turn those into very high-performance web and mobile applications out of the same source code base. I can let Sencha deal with all the different web browsers and rendering engines, and I can focus on my application’s differentiation.

JavaScript has come a long way and is the most popular, fastest-growing web development technology; it’s good looking and highly performant mobile apps come along for free. Investing engineering and development time in JavaScript is going to really pay off even more in the future. I saw a robot controlled with JavaScript, and we all know that while a lot of old-school companies are developing Internet of Things (IoT), painfully in C or C++, JavaScript is being used to build IoT apps that actually work faster than ever.

Another fun fact: Sencha launched Ext JS Community Edition (CE) during DeveloperWeek Austin, which gives students, hobbyists, startups, nonprofits and freelance developers free access to the Ext JS framework to learn and evaluate. Ext JS CE is a great choice for those who are looking to learn how to create stunning applications using the Ext JS framework and components. It’s perfect for people who are learning new programming languages, starting to develop cross-platform web apps, maintaining open source JavaScript projects, or who just want to learn how to use the Ext JS framework. See the blog post to learn more. It’s a free download, free to use, and provides an incredibly easy transition to Ext JS with all of its tested features. Download CE here.

There was too much going on to be able to relate all the interesting vendor exhibits, but seeing location-based services, speech-to-text services, robots, and other technologies just opens the door for enterprises to create applications that can replace enormously expensive “canned applications” from big software vendors with much more flexible, maintainable, and immediately deployable software in a DevOps environment. Finding a new great editor, Froala, and seeing it work with Ext JS and ExtReact was just icing on the cake. Anything to make a Developer’s job easier, faster, and more fun works for me.