Workshop scheduled at 1:00-4:00 in Room 1 (Johnson)

This session will be a hands-on deep dive into new, landmark features in ECMAScript 2015 (“ES6”) with an emphasis on the theory behind the new features, and how to use them to refactor existing code to be more clear.

We’ll spend most of our time building a deep understanding of generators and promises, which are new constructs in JavaScript that behave in fundamentally different ways than anything else in the language, and result in program structures which are dramatically different from what was possible in ES5. For instance, when PouchDB converted its APIs from callbacks to Promises, they were able to cut the applicable code in half: from 555 lines to 290.

We’ll also cover less transformative, but otherwise nice, features like “for of” loops, “=>” functions, the “class” keyword, template strings, and destructuring assignment. We’ll also talk about using Babel to transpile code from the ES6/ES7 future down to equivalent, backwards compatible ES5.

Attendee skill level: Attendees should be fluent in JavaScript, but not necessarily experts.

Dan Callahan

Dan Callahan is a Staff Software Engineer in Mozilla’s Developer Relations team, where he focuses on the Firefox Developer Tools. Dan previously worked on the Mozilla Persona project, an attempt at replacing passwords with user friendly public key cryptography built on open web standards.

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