JavaScript is in every browser. It’s flexible, dynamically, very dynamic, and somewhat flawed. Because of its shortcomings, there are countless languages that transpile to JavaScript. One of the most popular of these is TypeScript, which provides type-safety and other features like generics, as well as early implementations of new JavaScript features. TypeScript has become even more popular with the newer versions of Angular. However, developers often don’t take full advantage of the language, instead reverting to pure JavaScript when there’s a much better (and strongly typed) TypeScript alternative. In this session, we’ll take look at common features developers don’t use, and show you how to get the best out of this awesome language.

You’ve been comfortable building back-end services in Java or using a Java web framework, but now you must build an application using a JavaScript framework like Angular, React, Polymer, Ember, Backbone, or a home-grown mismatch of jQuery and custom code. Suddenly you have entered a parall universe with foreign terms like “bower”, “node”, “npm”, “webpack”, “AMD”, “CommonJS”, “ES6”, “ES2015”, “TypeScript”, “Babel”, “gulp”, “grunt”, “shim”, “polyfill”, and more. What do they all mean, and how are they related to each other? More importantly, how do they compare to what we know and love in the Java universe? Join us as we explore another universe.