Pusher at ngEurope and the Royal Hacakthon

As we mentioned in our post announcing the official pusher-angular library we were at ngEurope last week. For those of you who don’t know, ngEurope was the first conference in Europe dedicated to AngularJS.

There was a stellar lineup of speakers and the event was setup with a single stream of talks for all attendees. And there were a lot of attendees – around 800 or so. If you are an AngularJS fan then it was the place to be. Being surrounded by hundreds of other AngularJS fans as well as a large number of the core Angular team made for a great environment and the talks were well-received by everyone.

Tobias Bosch and Igor Minar were on the schedule to give a talk that was titled “Templating in Angular 2.0”. The title didn’t do justice to what they ended up delivering. It was a whirlwind tour of how templating is changing as Angular moves to 2.0 that included a somewhat brutal culling of some of the features of Angular that are so familiar. For example you will no longer be seeing $scope, the directive declaration object (DDO), angular.module and even controllers as soon as Angular hits 2.0. Some big changes, and that isn’t even all of them.

Miško Hevery, the father of AngularJS, gave a talk that was largely focussed on AtScript. AtScript is not a new language – Miško went over that point a fair few times and had it as one of his first couple of slides. It is instead designed as a set of extensions to Javascript that add in typing and annotations. The talk was enlightening and, while it only furthers the changes that will be present in Angular 2.0, definitely got me excited about where Angular is heading. Miško was also keen to stress that if you don’t want to adopt AtScript when Angular 2.0 is released then that’s not a problem. You’ll still be able to use 2.0 with vanilla Javascript. That said, I think pretty much everyone I spoke to was keen to try out AtScript and I’m no different.

One of my favourite talks was from Mattieu Lux. He was in the schedule as doing his talk on “AngularJS from Scratch”. I wondered what “Scratch” really meant in this sense. Impressively it really did mean starting with an empty window in his text editor and going from there. It was a great demonstration of how some of the fundamental concepts on AngularJS work including dirty checking and the digest loop. It was perfectly executed with the talk culminating in an example of some two-way binding.

If you’re interested in reading up on some more of what was announced with regards to Angular 2.0 then the Angular team posted a handy blog post that summarises most of the key changes.

The two day conference raced to its conclusion in seemingly no time at all and that led to Friday and the aptly named Royal Hackathon where we were one of the sponsors.

The setting was slightly surreal for a hackathon with the occasional group of tourists being led through the rooms in which 60 or so of us were hacking away at laptops. Some of the sponsors were giving away prizes to the teams that made the best use of the sponsors’ services and we were no different. The hack that we deemed to make the best use of Pusher would win one of the new GoPro Hero4 cameras.

There were some great use cases including using Pusher to provide chat functionality so that you could talk to your friends while using the Paris public API to see what sort of attractions were nearby. Another hack used Pusher to let you chat with friends that you have on your Spotify account. However, our favourite hack came from Michiel Helvensteijn who used Pusher to setup a 3d model of a ball rolling around of a platform that would update live on screen for whoever was browsing the page.

It was a great example of how you can use Pusher in a huge variety of different situations. His hack was well deserving of the prize and it was a great end to an awesome few days in Paris. Here’s hoping that there will be an ngEurope 2015.