JavaScript Powered Web Apps - new programming course

The world of web programming is moving ahead into what should be called Web 3.0 (the semantic web is just a pipe dream). It's using JavaScript as a unifying layer and re-imagining how the web can do what it does without the benefit of large back end frameworks. Web 1 was delivering files to a client. Web 2.0 was letting clients think they were in control by faking a desktop application over HTTP. And now we can have a true application that has been enhanced with networking to services in 3.0.

For the next several months I will be developing a new course to complement the classes that I wrote a few years back on HTML5, CSS, jQuery, jQuery Mobile, and JavaScript that bring these components together. I see tooling on web applications starting to mature and it is the right time to start to promote a new style of web application development. Except that there's no one way to do anything yet. Adobe is getting close to providing another great IDE with Edge Code but I think we're a ways off yet. Even Google might become a player here with their IDE code named Spark built with Dart and Polymer.

The new course, JavaScript Powered Web Apps, will walk students through building a "site" using combinations of node.js, nginx, SASS, Mongo, Bootstrap, Github, jQuery, jQuery Mobile, Grunt, AngularJS, Knockout, Express, etc. I'll probably do four days of sample sites and then show a web work flow and let students choose their own tools.

The course will assume some programming or design experience with a web site but most of the exercises will be scripted so that anyone can follow them. The students that likely will be most interested are those that don't have the back end skill set and see a tremendous advantage in learning only one language to do both front and back end coding. That means that anyone from high school that has learned the basics of HTML and CSS can enroll.

A lot of the training is on the administration and workflow of the tools which is harder to learn from books. I'll try to capture what I can for the exercises but if anyone has suggestions, I'm willing to listen. And as always, the class will continually be updated as the tools rev and newer tools emerge.

For instance, I'm still waiting to see how Famo.us is going to impact the animation tools. It looks incredible but won't be completely public until May 19th when HTML5 Dev Conference in San Francisco starts. And I want to spin up a partial.js site as well I think. But I'll never know until it's finished. After all, a project's requirements are never finished until the project is over.