Modern Application Foundations: Underscore and Twitter Bootstrap

We're all increasingly in the business of writing richly interactive applications using HTML and JavaScript … that's a given. But the devil's in the details, and most applications get those details wrong. Building visually attractive applications that work in all browsers takes a lot of work … and good as jQuery is, as more logic moves to the browser, something as sophisticated as jQuery is needed for data, not DOM, and that's Underscore.

Applications are moving from the server into the browser, and that can be a
good, and rewarding, thing … but compared to the rich infrastructure available
to any Java program, what's available to JavaScript running in the browser is
pretty anemic. jQuery is great at manipulating the DOM, but rich client
applications do a lot more than that, and too often, this leads to lots of code
and lots of bugs.

Underscore is your client-side infrastructure: a set of unobtrusive functional
programming tools that can make your JavaScript slick, performant, readable
… and compatible with older browsers.

However, Underscore doesn't make your application look pretty: that's the job of
Twitter's Bootstrap: a standard set of CSS rules that give your applications a
modern “Web 2.0” look and feel. Bootstrap is developed by experts to look good
across all the major browsers. We'll dive into how to use Bootstrap: how to get
good looking results up quickly, how all the CSS classes work together, and how
to get even better results using the bundled jQuery plugins.

About Howard Lewis Ship

Howard Lewis Ship is the original creator of the Apache Tapestry project, and is a noted expert on Java framework design and developer productivity. He has over twenty years of full-time software development under his belt, with over fifteen years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java.

Howard has been developing financial and e-commerce applications in 100% Clojure since 2012.

Howard currently works for Wal-Mart's Global E-Commerce division. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, and his children, Jacob and Olivia.

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