Last night, I gave a little talk about prototyping and Express at Node.ph’s holiday presentations. A very nice event, and I really enjoyed listening to all the presentations. Here are the resources from mine.
. @pamasaur at @nodephilly talking about prototyping with Balasamiq, justinmind proto.io twitter.com/gdiphilly/stat…
— GirlDevelopIt Philly (@gdiphilly) December 14, 2012
The Deck
If you haven’t navigated through a Reveal.js presentation before, do remember that sometimes you need to click down, and not just right arrows
In the talk, I mentioned the most common prototyping tools:
Balsamiq mockups
Justinmind Prototyper
Proto.io (the new kid in mobile prototyping, quite nice)
But then there’s Express.js. The demo video in the deck shows going from making a directory and a simple hello world to shipping to Heroku in about 3 1/2 minutes.*
I hope you enjoyed the presentation, and if you didn’t attend, do check out Express. I used it for prototyping purposes, because it’s ridiculously easy, but another attendee (from event sponsor &yet) said they use Express a lot because, when it’s ‘just javascript’, integrating with your own JSON APIs becomes very simple.
* There were two errors making the demo video: one, that the version of Express should have been 3.x (or more specific if it matters to you) to use certain functionality. Two, after I made the video, I realized that hard-setting ports does not work on Heroku. You’ll need:
var port = process.env.PORT || 5000;
app.listen(port);
After that, it’s happy on Heroku.