Slides from Haoyi’s talk are available here.
Abstract:
Developing for the web platform has historically been a slow, painful, fragile experience. You write code in multiple different languages, work with undocumented APIs, and are forced to implement things twice to have them work on both client and server. Lastly, you had better be the meticulous sort, because a single typo will bring down your site: at runtime, in production!
Scala.js is an attempt to fix this problem. Like other compile-to-JS languages, it provides a concise, expressive language to do your work. Unlike others, it also promises seamless interop with Javascript, a ready-to-go ecosystem, tool support, and a smooth development experience. Above all, Scala.js provides Safety: an extreme level of safety that goes far beyond any competitor. Not only is your Scala.js code checked, but any use of Javascript APIs is also checked, and so are your Ajax calls between client and server!
This talk will show off Scala.js and how you can get started using it. Starting from nothing, we will build a number of small Scala.js applications, which will hopefully demonstrate this promise. No Scala experience required.
About Haoyi:
Haoyi is a software engineer at Dropbox who writes Python and Coffeescript while working on the web codebase. In his free time, he works on various projects in Scala, most recently the Scala.js compiler and ecosystem.