In order to become more immersed and fluent in web and mobile technologies, I participated in the Hackergarten meetup in Basel last week.
We were a dozen people, mostly experienced in large-scale modern web and database technologies.
The suggested topics were legion, including WebRTC, Spike/Chatapp, Node Webkit, JS tools, CouchDB, Ionic Framework, High scalability, Guice, Gradle plugin, Android slide show, Polymar JS (similar to Angular).
I sat down with three other guys with the goal of exploring PouchDB.
It is an open-source JavaScript database inspired by Apache CouchDB that runs well within the browser and enables applications that work as well offline as they do online, storing data locally while offline, then synchronising it with CouchDB and compatible servers when the application is back online, keeping the user's data in sync no matter where they next login.
We installed the bower package manager to simplify the development work and package management:
We installed the grunt JavaScript task runner in order to run a local web server for testing:
The web server is provided by the grunt-contrib-connect plugin.
Those packages were installed and running within minutes, we had a framework set up for developing, and a local web server running for testing.
We started exploring PouchDB step by step in the DjDoodle project that I set up on GitHub for testing purposes.
As a summary, I can say I saw a lot of powerful and impressive technology.
One little immediate consequence I took was to install and start using Chrome instead of Firefox :-)
