JavaScript Meetup

We’ve learned how to deliver video content on the web, what challenges come with it, and how to use Puppeteer to build scripts that can automate web tasks.

Doug Sillars who is a leading mobile developer advocate and evangelist broke the ice. He is widely known as an expert in mobile application architecture, especially when it comes to performance. His topic was “Streaming video on the web”.

Doug said: “The use of video on the web and on mobile is growing. It is as easy as adding a, and you’re good to go. But, all the top video sites (YouTube, Netflix, Hulu) all stream their video. What do they know that we don’t know? Is streaming more eicient? Do I need any special equipment to create or serve video streams?”.

In the end, we learned how to create and stream videos, weigh the pros and cons of streaming vs. static videos, and see how easy it is to get started delivering streaming content on the web or to a mobile app. Also, we looked at the performance aspects of delivering video on the web, and how to improve the performance of video by using streaming instead of static videos.

Luka Fućek was next with his topic “Web automation with Puppeteer”.

Luka started the talk with a lot of questions: “Ever wanted to make your own internet bot that would buy you a first ticket for the newest Tarantino premiere? Or maybe you don’t like the UI for ordering food from your favorite restaurant so you would like to have your node script order it for you every day?”.

And then he explained how does the automated web interaction work using Google’s Puppeteer — a Node library that provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium.