To summarise, I have to say it was a very productive week with many hours spent on development. More than in a normal work week. But I believe it was worth putting in the extra hours to see the final result.
CoffeeScript was a very nice discovery and made writing JavaScript really nice. It was hard though to change my mind about some ways things get written but once past that, all was well. Almost. At some point the code editing became very laggy. Turns out the Mindscape Web Workbench is not perfect. We installed the beta version and it sped up the process a lot but just until it started crashing Visual Studio every now and again. I ended up with an external compiler.
So until a stable release of Mindscape Workbench with Google’s V8 javascript engine I do strongly suggest looking for other VS plugin or using a external compiler.
Backbone was very usefull as well. Pretty self explanatory and simple enough to use yet quite powerful. It wasn’t easy trying to write backbone code using the CoffeeScriptsyntax (as there aren’t many Backbone tutorials out there in CoffeeScript) but it was just a matter of getting used to it. In the end backbone proved to be a very usefull framework and at times we were amazed that it is actually doing stuff for us – in a good way! Not sure if we’d gotten to the point we’ve got if we were writing bare JavaScript.
I haven’t been really involved in the ASP.Net MVC REST server development which I regret a bit but the guys say it was simple enough. RavenDB was hanging in the background and proved to be enough for our little web app. The UI for Raven was nice until we had to deal with deleting a lot of objects. They are probably ways for that – we just didn’t get around to look for it and you can’t just write a simple delete SQL command for it. It was nice though not having any SQL server, or SQL code flying around.
The canvas based controls came out pretty well. Another thing I regret I didn’t get involved with. Oh well, I’ll have to do that in my spare time.
The most disapointing peace of tech was mercurial version control. From the very beginning we didn’t feel at ease with it and seemed to be struggling at each turn. The most hectic time was at the very beginning when we did not know the proper procedure (which mostly is commit, pull, merge, commit, push – as crazy as it sounds) and had a lot of commits in the short span of time.
We got used to it at some point, but still we felt like there is far to many steps to just commit your stuff to the repository. Mercurial has its own local repository so that was confusing as well. The fact that it did not let us push things unless everything is committed didn’t help us as well. Maybe we just have an old SVN way of thinking in our heads and can’t switch properly but if we had to start over Mercurial would not be the way to go.
All in all I believe it was a very fruitfull week that let us test new technologies and have fun while doing it. The outcome is also quite amazing and shows the great potential of HTML5.
All that said, Mariusz, Neil, Luke – many thanks for a well spent week. And thanks to OCC for allowing us to have our DevCamp.