James Carr

Whew this session was a tough one for me to decide on what to go to. As I had previously mentioned, Ted Neward was giving a presentation on Scala this session. Jeff Brown had a session on using Groovy for builds. Nathaniel Schutta is presenting part two of Designing for Ajax, which would cover “advanced ajax” concepts including offline Ajax apps with Google Gears.

When it came down to it, I had to flip a coin to decide whether to go to a session on Scala or a session on Ajax… and Designing for Ajax won. Luckily I did convince a few friends to attend the Scala session though, so at least I played a small part in accelerate it’s exposure.

Anyhow, right off the bat what I like about the session. He covered CSS Selectors. Using CSS selectors to get what you want from your html document is probably THE most important skill you can have when working with javascript. Let me drive this point in… almost every single major javascript library provides some kind of support for CSS Selectors. I think it’s great that Nathaniel exposed everyone to this and mentioned my favorite library, jQuery (which is practically built on CSS Selector querying). Good stuff, good start… a lot of people were awed when they saw the simplicity of using CSS Selectors!

A lot of the session was dojo/prototype based, but very pleasing. Demos were given for achieving “in-place editing“, using Lightbox, and others. Google Gears was also covered briefly using the dojo offline toolkit… although I wish I could have seen a little more of it, but only because I have only scratched the surface of Googe Gears already and wanted to see more.

What Made Me Smile

A lot of developers these days, and even many book authors, will cop out and focus on programmatic aspects and ignore good, structural html… often opting to leave a bunch of crap invalid html on the page and passing a bad practice on to others. Nathaniel’s html was very structurally clean and made sense, using label tags for labels (with for attributes). People learning from his examples will possibly construct better html too.

What I Got Out Of It

I admit I was a little scared… once he covered Google Gears and left it, I was afraid I had chosen another session where I already knew the subject matter being presented well. Luckily I learned a few things about prototype and dojo that I hadn’t previously known. Of course anytime developers are proven that good, clean, and efficient javascript can be written, I’m happy. The common stereotype is that java developers HATE javascript, seeking out frameworks and tag libraries to generate it for them and complaining or cringing when they hear the word “javascript” mentioned. Seeing developers brace this great language more (while being aware of the pitfalls) is a great goal.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.