The first ever VueConf.US took place March 26-28 in New Orleans, bringing together the VueJS Core team and hundreds of Vue developers from around the world. The conference contained a single day of workshops, all taught by members of the VueJS core team, followed by two days of talks. Previously InfoQ published a summary of the morning sessions from March 27; this is the summary of the afternoon sessions.
Presentations covered integrations between Vue.js and popular tooling such as serverless functions and RxJS, building native applications with vuejs-nativescript, and closed with a wide-ranging panel discussion.
Serverless Functions and Vue.js
After an hour of community lightning talks, Sarah Drasner, senior developer advocate at Microsoft, spoke about combining serverless functions with Vue.js.
That brings us to serverless. It's an actually interesting thing, with a really clickbaity title.
Drasner introduced a more descriptive term for 'serverless': 'Functions as a service', and pointed out a number of benefits: paying only for what is used, less babysitting than a server, and automatic scalability.
Drasner then proceded to highlight a number of good usecases such as cleaning data, cropping images, and generating visualizations. She walked through a pair of examples utilizing serverless functions to handle things like completing stripe transactions and batching API calls.
Vue-Rx
The next speaker was John Lindquist, CEO of Egghead.io. Lindquist introduced the audience to RxJS (Reactive extensions to JavaScript), and commented on the best way to learn:
Let's not spend too much time on the language - there's a lot of language to absorb in RxJS - but dive in and the experience of working through it can really help it make sense.
Lindquist then proceeded to live code for the remainder of his talk. He walked through progressively more and more complex examples, showing how a developer can use RxJS to seamlessly process user generated events, ajax responses, and more all in a single event stream.
Create an Engaging Native Mobile App with Vue and NativeScript
Jen Looper, developer advocate for Telerik and founder of the Vue Vixens, gave the next talk, walking the audience through the process of creating a native mobile application using vue and NativeScript. Looper noted the rapid progress in the vue-nativescript implementation:
Vue-nativescript reached 1.0 at Vue.js Amsterdam and we’re already at 1.3.1 so we’re really moving and shaking.
Looper highlighted three basic differences between building for the web and building for mobile with NativeScript. First, you start by importing vue-nativescript instead of vue. Second, when instantiating a Vue instance you don't pass in an el argument - because after all, in native there is no DOM. Finally, and most definitively, layouts on mobile can be pretty different, as they use native layout elements.
Despite the strong difference in layouts, there is great interest in being able to develop true native applications using the same codebase as websites, and tooling is being developed to facilitate it. Looper teased a still-under-development feature of single-file Vue components with multiple templates, relying on the build system to render the correct template for native or web.
Panel Discussion
Day 1 of VueConf.US closed with a panel discussion with speakers and members of the core team. The panel consisted of Evan You, Sarah Drasner, Divya Sasidharan, and Chris Fritz. Questions varied widely, from inquiries about the future of Vue to questions about how the panelists got started in open source, to how to give back to Vue.JS. Answering a question about the vision of server-side rendering, Evan You gave some insight into how the core team is thinking about the ecosystem in general:
We want to have clear separation of different layers. The functionality that Vue provides out of the box is going to be relatively low level compared to e.g. Nuxt.
As it stands right now, we're intentially leaving server-side rendering out in vue-cli3 because Nuxt exists and does a great job. It's possible someone could implement a plugin for this, but in the long run we want to make sure the community has one good choice.
Answering a question about how people use Vue around the world, the panel emphasized how the diverse and decentralized nature of the Vue community has helped it grow. Drasner highlighted the benefits for the documentation:
The documentation has become stronger because there are so many international people working on the team. I will sometimes devolve to slang, but having other people on the team from all over the place they will immediately say 'I don't know what you mean by this'.
Fritz chimed in on the high levels of involvement in the documentation:
I'm really happy with the involvement in the docs. We have 390 contributors to the docs so far, and counting. Keep it up!
Throughout the discussion, the panel emphasized the multitude of ways to contribute. Evan You highlighted the value of answering questions in the forum, while Fritz and Drazner both emphasized the creation of educational materials. Sasidharan brought up the value of simply communicating about projects built using Vue:
What will also help is to see Vue out in the wild, because after all, it's really about who's using it and how they're using it. The cookbook is a great opportunity for this.
All of the talks, including the lightning talks and panel discussion, were recorded and will be posted on VueMastery.com. InfoQ is covering VueConf with Q&As and summaries.
