Modern Front End Development: With Astonishing Live Demo

Within just the last year or so, Front End developers have begun to benefit from the advent of extraordinarily powerful tools, finally achieving something close to parity with the tooling back-end developers have taken for granted all along. These include:

• Zurb Foundation and Twitter Bootstrap for rapid prototyping
• SASS and Compass for CSS Preprocessing
• Bower for Package management
• Require.js for module loading
• JsHint for code quality
• Yeoman for webapp scaffolding
• GruntJS for task automation
• Backbone, Ember, Angular, and others for front-end MVX implementation

In this presentation, I will give a brief tour of these tools, with examples of their usefulness and their interactions. But the most important part will be a live demo of how they all snap together to create a simple single page webapp -- which I'll do from scratch live onstage. Wait, what did he say? You heard me right: I will start with an empty directory and build an actual Backbone webapp live onstage. Or else will fail spectacularly. Either way, it'll be a great story.

I'll give some sense of how these techniques apply to Drupal theming, but really this is a presentation focusing on other technologies, so that Drupal Themers and front-end developers can be aware of the state of the art.