This week's interview features Fil Maj, of Adobe's PhoneGap project. PhoneGap is a cross-device runtime platform for hosting HTML and Javascript applications on tablets, phones and other hand-held devices. Chariot's consulting practice director Don Coleman joins us as he's worked with Phil on phone gap and plugins, so he lends a hand guiding the conversation. I hope you enjoy this podcast. 

Our first podcast from Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise is our Javascript frameworks panel. Led by Robert Hansen, author of GWT in Action and host of our prior Web Framework shootout in 2011, it includes developers who contribute to Meteor, Backbone, Ember and AngularJS, four Javascript frameworks that cover the gamut between all-in one platforms to comprehensive client-tier frameworks to strongly focused and less-comprehensive and more configurable ones.

Panel members

Robert Hansen - moderator
Avital Oliver - Meteor Development group, core developer
Tim Branyan - Matchbox - Backbone contributor
Yehuda Katz - creator of Ember, Rails Ruby and other standards projects contributor
Brian Ford - AngularJS Core Team / Google / co-author AngularJS in Action
Lukas Ruebbelke - Senior Engineer WebFilings - co-author of AngularJS in Action

Sponsored by the Chariot Education Services Team.

This podcast episode is an interview with three leaders of the 2013 Philadelphia Enterprise Hack-a-thon contest, which is being launched at Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise on April 2-3, 2013. 

The interviewees are:

  • Mike Schellhase  - Director of Field Applications - Bentley Systems 
  • Phil Moyer - Managing Director of Technology @ Safeguard Scientific
  • Satwik Seshasai - VP of Engineering at NextDocs
If you can't attend Philly ETE 2013, we'll have the video of their session up shortly after the conference, so stay tuned on our corporate twitter account, @ChariotSolution, or on our multi-media site, emergingtech.chariotsolutions.com for the full video. But for now, if you want to get more information, listen to the interview and also check out their website: phillyenterprisehackathon.com.

Lukas Ruebbelke and Brian Ford, both speaking at Philly Emerging Tech this April, are co-authors of the forthcoming Manning book, AngularJS in Action. They are currently preparing for their first Manning Early Access release, or MEAP.

When Brian was working at Google as an intern, he was exposed to the Angular framework and learned quite a lot about it. So much in fact, that he developed the AngularJS Batarang, a Chrome debugging tool, and helped to launch their documentation site, also written in Angular.

Lukas has been working for over ten years as an application developer, starting with programming languages such as ActionScript and Flash, and then moving into the Javascript/HTML 5 world. He came upon Angular and also enjoyed working with it, as it just made sense to him.

In this TechCast episode, we'll discuss this framework, which helps developers put together browser-centric HTML and Javascript applications. We'll find out the major components, such as a very easily understood Model View Controller framework, the ViewModel or $scope, and other features such as services and the all-powerful Angular directives.

Topics mentioned include:

  • Models, Views, Controller
  • The Angular ViewModel
  • Scopes
  • Services and state
  • De-composing pages into multiple controllers
  • Yeoman as a build tool for Angular and other platforms
  • What are Angular Directives?

Books mentioned:

  • Javascript, the Good Parts - Douglas Crockford
  • Javacript Patterns
  • Javascript Enlightenment

Joel Confino is a long-time consultant at Chariot Solutions. He has spent the last four years working with a large enterprise, here named ABC Corporation, rolling out a new development platform and build process. Joel was one of two speakers at our event, which also included Sonatype's Jason Van Zyl. Joel's focus was building in competitive advantage by choosing to implement continuous integration tools such as Maven, Nexus, Jenkins, and Sonar.