Slides available

The slides from this presentation can be found at http://mikkel.hoegh.org/presentations/2014-10-02-drupal-ember

Description

As web sites are becoming ever more dynamic and interactive, they turn more application-like.

Responsiveness is everything when building modern web applications. For this reason, client-side web frameworks do not reload the entire page whenever a user clicks something.

Ember.js is known from, among other things, the Discourse project, and is minded towards ambitious web frameworks. It is a full-stack, browser-side MVC framework. It handles routing based on URL, rendering of templates and business logic, all in the browser.

When building Ember.js applications, it is still necessary with a server-side backend that handles access control, provides admin interfaces, etc., and Drupal is well suited for this purpose.

During this session, I will demonstrate how to build hyper-responsive web applications on top of Drupal with Ember.js, how to hook up Ember Data with the Services module (for Drupal 7) or the new Web Services layer (for Drupal 8), so Drupal entities can be exposed to the JavaScript frontend for CRUD.

I will also dive into how Drupal can be used to bootstrap the Ember.js app to increase the performance of the initial page load, as well as interactive pagination, lazy-loading and other UX and performance tweaks to make your web application more responsive.