My overarching goal as CTO of MongoDB is to make building applications easier and easier. Given my day job, it’s actually been a little while since I did any work on the front end.

Since we started MongoDB, client side javascript has really taken off. This pleases me, because our decision to make JavaScript a core part of the MongoDB experience was based on a view that JavaScript would continue to rise in capability and prominence. Back in 2005, I was spending quite a bit of time in JavaScript, but the state of the art has changed dramatically since then.

Wanting to refresh myself, I wrote a proof-of-concept real time dashboard for MongoDB, using JavaScript and Handlebars.

{%img /images/handlebars-dashboard-poc.png %}

Sure, it’s not much to look at, but I was really excited about how easy it was to do full client rendering with just API calls for data compared to last time I tried. In addition, I finally took ES6 for a test drive, and have to say classes and modules live up to what I had hoped for.

I think next up is react.