Recent proliferation of smartphones and tablet devices is due at least in part to the advent of apps, which customize and streamline user experience in a variety of usage scenarios. Today, hundreds of thousands of apps exist on the major mobile OS platforms (notably, iOS and Android), and we are witnessing a clear change in the way people consume and interact with information online. This leads to one of the most powerful trends in Web app design — the move from multipage Web applications to single page applications driven by javascript and access to a powerful API.

We'll talk about the web-app landscape and why you should care, as well as how to get data in and out of Drupal 7 and what to expect in Drupal 8. We’ll contrast the two leading javascript frameworks, Backbone.js and Angular.js, walk through a case study integrating Angular.js with Drupal, discuss core concepts of Angular.js and introduce the basics so you can get started on your own Drupal + Angular.js projects.

Topics we'll discuss:

• REST APIs
• Leading Javascript frameworks and their approaches to web application development
• Structure of a web application
• Web applications the Drupal way
• Angular + Drupal Case studies
• Looking forward to Drupal 8 and web services