2018.07.23 - Visualization Grammar G2 3.2 Release

Title: 2018.07.23 – Visual Grammar G2 3.2 Release

Industry Conferences

GeekPark – Rebuild 2018 http://rebuild.geekpark.net/ Attachments:

• How the Shell VR Home‑Tour Went from Zero to One
• DJI’s Next Step in Industrial‑Grade Ambition: Paving Roads, Building Bridges, and Catalyzing Progress
• Post‑Event Backflipping Robots vs. Quad‑Limbed Bulldogs: Who Truly Has “Intelligence”?
• 19‑Year‑Old iFlytek Wants AI to Open the Door to a New World

In‑Depth Reading

Building the Google Photos Web UI https://medium.com/google-design/google-photos-45b714dfbed1
We wanted to try something ambitious and simultaneously support a full‑width (justified) layout, preserve the aspect‑ratio of each photo, be scrubbable (i.e., let you jump to any section of your archive), handle hundreds of thousands of photos, scroll at 60 fps, and load near instantly. At the time no other photo gallery supported all of this, and to the best of my knowledge they still don’t. While many other galleries now support some of these features they usually square‑crop each photo to make the layout work. Here is a technical write‑up about how we solved those challenges, and a peek under the hood of how the web version of Google Photos works.

The Future of WebAssembly – A Look at Upcoming Features and Proposals https://blog.scottlogic.com/2018/07/20/wasm-future.html
WebAssembly is a performance‑optimized virtual machine that was shipped in all four major browsers earlier this year. It is a nascent technology and the current version is very much an MVP (minimum viable product). This blog post takes a look at the WebAssembly roadmap and the features it might gain in the near future. I’ll try to keep this blog post relatively high‑level, so I’ll skip over some of the more technical proposals, instead focusing on what they might mean for languages that target WebAssembly.

Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet https://alistapart.com/article/webmentions-enabling-better-communication-on-the-internet
Over 1 million Webmentions will have been sent across the internet since the specification was made a full Recommendation by the W3C—the standards body that guides the direction of the web—in early January 2017. That number is rising rapidly, and in the last few weeks I’ve seen a growing volume of chatter on social media and the blogosphere about these new “mentions” and the people implementing them.

A One‑Year PWA Retrospective https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/a-one-year-pwa-retrospective-f4a2f4129e05
The idea of building a “Progressive Web App” (PWA) is not new, but its definition has changed with the emergence of key technologies like service workers. Now it’s finally possible to build great experiences in a mobile browser. Being an early adopter can be scary, so we’d like to share a brief overview of our experience building one of the world’s largest progressive web apps.

CSS‑in‑JS: FTW || WTF? https://vimeo.com/278439003
Everyone’s talking about CSS‑in‑JS. It’s the Kim Kardashian of web development. And, as with Kimmie, opinions are polarized. To some, CSS‑in‑JS just makes sense: it’s local to your component, it can’t leak, and “hey, I know how to write JavaScript and CSS is weird.” To others, CSS‑in‑JS is an abomination that makes them want to emulate Kimmie and “release a fragrance” in disdain. Why are scripters so afraid of the cascade? Why the hesitance about inheritance? Let’s look at what CSS seems to lack, what the CSS‑in‑JS libraries can teach us, so we don’t do as Kim’s buttocks did and “break the Internet.”

Visual Grammar G2 3.2 Iteration https://yuque.com/antv/blog/g2-3.2-release
G2 is one of the flagship products of Ant Financial’s Experience Technology Department AntV (http://antv.alipay.com/). The three major features of version 3.2: charts that tell stories, higher information‑retrieval efficiency, and one‑click skin switching.

Meituan Client‑Side Responsive Framework EasyReact Open‑Source https://tech.meituan.com/react_programming_framework_easyreact_opensource.html
EasyReact (https://github.com/meituan/EasyReact) is a client‑development framework based on the reactive programming paradigm, allowing developers to easily solve asynchronous problems on the client side. EasyReact has already been used in several services of Meituan and Dianping’s mobile apps and has been iterated for over a year. Recently we decided to open‑source the iOS Objective‑C portion of the project, hoping to help more developers explore broader business scenarios, and we welcome community contributors to help strengthen EasyReact’s capabilities.

WebIDE: The Era of Coding Directly in the Browser Is Near https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MjM5MDE0Mjc4MA==&mid=2651008292&idx=1&sn=9ea83174885b14d39ba75e9cdc60f075
In development tools, IDEs have traditionally been the exclusive domain of tool vendors, but now they have become a focal point for cloud providers. What exactly is a WebIDE? How does it differ from traditional IDEs? What technologies power it? Why are cloud vendors so invested in it? This article addresses these questions one by one.

Operationalizing Node.js for Server‑Side Rendering https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/operationalizing-node-js-for-server-side-rendering-c5ba718acfc9
As Airbnb builds more of its frontend around Server‑Side Rendering, we took a look at how to optimize our server configurations to support it.

N‑API: Next‑Generation APIs for Node.js Native Add‑ons Available Across All LTS Release Lines https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/n-api-next-generation-apis-for-node-js-native-addons-available-across-all-lts-release-lines-4f35b781f00e
N‑API was introduced as an experimental feature in Node.js 8.0, and after meeting a rigorous exit criteria defined by the community, it has been promoted to a supported feature in Node.js 10. It has also been back‑ported to all LTS release lines. Having N‑API with the same API across all LTS releases is a great milestone and we believe this is a significant step toward enabling its adoption. Many thanks to Gabriel Schulhof, who put in a tremendous amount of effort to back‑port this feature across these versions.

Location‑Aware Distribution: Configuring Servers at Scale https://code.fb.com/data-infrastructure/location-aware-distribution-configuring-servers-at-scale/
In this post we describe Location‑Aware Distribution (LAD), a new peer‑to‑peer system that handles the distribution of configuration changes to millions of servers. We find that LAD is dramatically better at distributing large updates—100 MB for LAD versus 5 MB previously—and also scales to support around 40,000 subscribers per distributor versus 2,500 before.

Productivity at Scale: How We Improved Build Time by 400 % at LinkedIn https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2018/07/how-we-improved-build-time-by-400-percent
One source of the productivity loss was the build system. Play Framework uses SBT as its default build system. SBT had served us well for a couple of years, however the growing size of our applications and LinkedIn’s scale started to push the build system to its limits. So we started to look for alternatives and eventually decided to move to Gradle. A year later, as of this post, our largest Play app takes less than 5 minutes for IDE refresh, and build times are down from 60 minutes to 15 minutes. Here’s the story of how we got to this point.

The Holy Grail of Reusable Components: Custom Elements, Shadow DOM, and NPM https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/07/reusable-components-custom-elements-shadow-dom-npm/
This article looks at augmenting HTML with components that have built‑in functionality and styles. We’ll also learn how to make… (content truncated)

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Originally written by Ping Xia (平侠) and published in Chinese on Web技术周刊 (Web Tech Weekly). Translated and adapted for DriftSeas with permission.