For years front-end developers have bemoaned having to use the DOM; it’s slow, inconsistent, and difficult to use. While libraries of the past provided better ways to interface with the DOM, recent libraries like React and Vue have instead implemented an entirely new DOM: the virtual DOM. Implementations of the virtual DOM allow developers to create and maintain UI components using entirely declarative interfaces that completely abstract away the real DOM. In this session, attendees will unlock the power of the virtual DOM through a step-by-step tutorial on the creation of a virtual DOM implementation in roughly 100 lines of code. In doing so, they will gain a precise understanding of the advantages the virtual DOM provides to speed, maintainability, and testability.

Jeff Blankenburg is an Alexa Evangelist at Amazon.

React and Angular 2 are getting a lot of buzz these days, but how do you decide which one to use? I took a small Rails app that I have in production and rewrote it using both Angular 2 and React. I’ll show you the code for the different versions, which will cover project setup, routing, validation, view syntax, JSX, handling query string parameters, managing state, Redux, Redux reducers, hot reloading, and testing. I’ll go over some pros and cons and things I like/don’t like that might help you decide which way to go.