Foreword

I had my first encounter with web technology in the late 1990s. At that time, and for a number of years that followed, I was knee-deep in native desktop development. The Web, with its static pages and limited interactivity, held no interest for me.

Then, the iPhone came, and everything changed.

Very quickly, the world of one-platform desktop application development was no longer a viable business. Customers demanded rich experiences that worked equally well on iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and much more. In response, I returned to revisit the Web, hoping to find a way to build native-like experiences in a cross-platform way. In the 10-year span since I first searched, the Web had grown considerably. What was once a world of lifeless text and few images is now a rapidly evolving platform. Styling, animation, layout, SVG, drawing APIs, and many more features were available or soon to be shipped as part of HTML5. JavaScript was also being reborn with built-in primitives for async programming and new language constructs for classes, lambdas, destructuring, and more. All the raw materials for a rich application platform were there, yet something was missing. There was still no way to create components, that is, no built-in concept of an "app," and no mechanism for building multi-screen experiences.

Enter Aurelia.

In early 2015, we shipped the first alpha of Aurelia, a platform with high-performance component rendering rich data-binding, routing, publish-subscribe, data validation, i18n, and more. We took everything we'd learned from building rich desktop applications over the years and reimagined it on top of the modern web. The result is one of the most elegant application frameworks today, and the subject of the book you're holding in your hand.

I'm excited about Full Stack Aurelia Web Development. You're about to embark on an amazing journey that spans the breadth of the modern web. If you haven't looked at HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a while, don't worry. This book will bring you up to speed on new language standards and browser capabilities. From there, you'll learn how to build applications by thinking in terms of "components." You'll see how to style, test, and debug components; assemble components into screens coordinated by a router; manage data and communication with the server; and even cross-component messaging, modal dialogs, and internationalization.

If you're ready to pe in to modern web development and are looking for a simple and intuitive guide into this exciting new world, you've found it right here. I can't wait to see what you build.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Eisenberg 

Aurelia Project Lead