First of all, thanks to everyone that attended. We had around 35 people show up which is more than I ever expected when this was first put together. I think it shows the interest out there in the tool set and means that there is the ability to grow a solid community around the technology.
Thanks also to Nathan Naze who organized the space and took those newer to Closure under his wing - I'm sure they all learned a lot and there will be new users coming in.
The topics ranged throughout the talk and we covered a lot of bases as it was a round table discussion. One of the main subjects was work processes and how everyone used the tools. A lot of people use http://plovr.com/ or are now going to give it a go. The rest just use the scripts that come with the library with make or ant. Because of the interest our next meetup will be called "show us your stack" and I'm hoping to get a few people to take us through their workflow. I've put it up for a couple of months time at: http://www.meetup.com/Closure-Tools/events/68334272/ though it is far from confirmed. Let me know if you would like to share your setup, I'm thinking that a quick run through of a few people's setup will help (so anywhere from 5-30 mins just let me know how long you need).
Another important topic was the sharing of closure specific libraries. At the moment you can find projects in the wiki at: http://code.google.com/p/closure-library/wiki/RelatedProjects but it can be hard to find especially for new users. I'd like to see a communtiy driven website which can list libraries, externs, IDE setups etc. that we can share with each other. Anyone good at website design?
I also talked about a "starter pack" that would include projects like plovr, http://bolinfest.com/coffee/features.html, https://github.com/rhysbrettbowen/PlastronJS, https://github.com/rhysbrettbowen/G-closure and some gss style sheets (ala bootstrap), IDE components and a tutorial that could help users start on single page apps using interfaces and patterns that are familiar to them. I haven't started on the project yet but I'm hoping for contributions (especially with the IDE components) so we can lower the bar for entry into the toolset.
There was also some discussion about a package manager (perhaps a fork of NPM) which would help users with discovery and use of modules.
These are all really exciting propositions and the future looks bright.
Sorry I missed this - saw it a week late, but I'm glad there's interest in generating a community around these great tools outside of the Googles.
ReplyDeleteI have a pretty extensive build process that I would be happy to share next time (includes linting, compiling in advanced mode, calculating dependencies for runtime goog.require() calls, generating source maps, compiling .soy templates, auto-updating libraries, generating JSDoc, etc.). Let me know if you would like to chat about it.