Airbnb’s Wish Lists: Rich JavaScript App Architecture

Spike discusses how his team built the frontend architecture necessary to support Airbnb’s latest rich-client JavaScript app: Wish Lists. Built on top of Backbone.js and Handlebars, Wish Lists is an example of the new generation of single-page apps that is taking the web by storm. He will share how the team tackled a number of issues with this modern approach, including internationalization, client-side rendering, HTML5 pushState, cross-domain API, composite views, and memory management. He will also share his latest research into the holy grail for rich JavaScript apps — DRY client-server rendering — and why Airbnb is moving from Rails to Node.js.

Spike is a Front End Engineer specializing in building rich-client JavaScript apps at Airbnb. In over a decade of experience with JavaScript — his first code was for UI widgets on a Geocities page — he has seen the role of JavaScript on the web morph from black sheep to king of the hill. Currently in love with Backbone.js, Handlebars and CoffeeScript, he’s wrestling with the ubiquitous problem of rendering JavaScript apps on both the client and server, using Node.js to prototype the next generation of Airbnb’s front end stack.

Spike’s slides: http://nerds.airbnb.com/slides-and-vi…