MozCampAsia2012/Anatomy of an App

Title of Session (should also be the title of your Wiki page):

Anatomy of an Open Web App--and How to Create Your Own Today

Facilitator(s):

Ricky Rosario (r1cky) and Matthew MacPherson (tofumatt)

Are you paid or volunteer staff?:

paid

Area of Contribution (Team Name):

WebDev

How are you currently involved with the community?:

[r1cky] I am a webdev steward always looking for new ways to get more people to contribute to webdev projects. I am also involved in the Mozilla Hispano community helping out with some of their web projects and in keeping SUMO article localizations up to date.

[tofumatt] I'm a webdev based out of Canada who has met with community members in lots of continents and work on the developer ecosystem team. Our goal is to improve tooling and process for developers by building apps like them and finding the gaps in our system. I work on making it easy for app developers to get started using web app templates and more recently testing FirefoxOS apps using r2d2b2g.

Location of Work (where do you reside?):

[r1cky] Florida, USA

[tofumatt] Montréal, Canada

Talk Length (please choose between 30, 60, 90, 120 minutes):

90-120 (if including some time for hacking afterward) 60 (if hacking will take place in the open space after the talk)

Summary:

Open Web Apps and/or FirefoxOS apps are a buzz word in the Mozilla community nowadays, but actually building and shipping an app is still a mystery to many. Instead of the boilerplate "just use HTML5!" response many developers here, we'll show you how to build first-class apps and games instead of boring grocery list apps.

Instead of showing templates or best practices in theory, we'll demo some apps made with our own Open Web App Templates -- mortar, WebGameStub, and sutthisan. We'll disect at least one app made with each -- how it works, how it's tested, and how it's deployed. We'll show how to submit apps to the Marketplace. Time permitting, we'll also cover localization in apps.

Finally, we'll have links to app templates, app ideas, and semi-built apps so everyone from hackers with a set app idea to someone without an app idea themselves can get hacking on apps after the talk. We'll hold set "office hours" and aim to be around in an open hacking space after our talk for the weekend so folks can come and hack after the talk.

NOTE: If there's interest we'd love to hold extra hack time after the MozCamp itself, but that's outside the scope of the talk proposal.

How your session furthers the MozCamp Goals:

B2G and Apps: Get developers more comfortable with the entire app development/submission process by taking the hardest two parts out of the equation: how to get started and what to build once you have. By supplying both ideas and templates developers can hit the ground running. tofumatt did this at BrazilJS and the results were very impressive and the feedback was very positive. (https://blog.mozilla.org/webdev/2012/10/02/apps-are-boring-games-are-fun/) Gets more apps on Desktop/Mobile/Firefox OS too. Evangelizes tech present in all these platforms (gaming tech, bananabread, webAPIs, etc.)

Expected Outcome or Deliverable:

• X new apps developed during mozcamp and submitted to Marketplace.
• Attendees realize how easy it is to build and submit an app with their existing webdev skills.
• Attendees create exciting, quality apps by seeing what we've made already. The days of a million to-do app demos come to an end!

Desired Audience Type or Skill-set:

• Webdevs (html/css/js) skills
• Ideally, this talk would follow both Jeff Grifiths' r2d2b2g talk and potch's apps talk

Equipment Needs (Video projector already included):

None

To Be Completed by the Audience

(If you would like) Submit a Question for the Speaker(s) or indicate what information you hope to gain by attending this talk here:

Place your name here if you would like to attend this talk:

• Huda Sarfraz