Bulletproof JavaScript

Take a look at your codebase. Go ahead, this abstract will wait. Notice anything? Perhaps a few more lines of JavaScript than years past? JavaScript is no longer an outlier, a language for the interns, something we can just mash together. Today, JavaScript is a first class citizen. As such, we need to treat it will all the care and feeding we extend our server side languages. This talk will introduce you to a set of tools that will help you write bulletproof JavaScript.

Step one, make sure we aren't making any basic mistakes like using == when we really mean ===. To remedy these types of bugs, we'll leverage JSHint to statically analyze our code. In addition to walking through the setup, we'll discuss how to ratchet up the rules as you improve your codebase. Just like Java or C#, we also need to test our JavaScript code. We'll introduce Jasmine, a BDD style testing tool as well as other tools that make help in the testing process. Last but not least, we'll take a tour of Plato, a JavaScript source code visualizer. Taken together, these tools can go a long way to improve your JavaScript code.

About Nathaniel Schutta

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a software architect and Java Champion focused on cloud computing, developer happiness and building usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written multiple books, appeared in countless videos and many podcasts. He’s also a seasoned speaker who regularly presents at worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, meetups, universities, and user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches students to embrace (and evaluate) technical change. Driven to rid the world of bad presentations, he coauthored the book Presentation Patterns with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough, and he also published Thinking Architecturally and Responsible Microservices available from O’Reilly. His latest book, Fundamentals of Software Engineering, is currently available in early release.

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