Sessions

Best-practice solutions for common Ajax use-cases with Prototype

These use cases drop in time and again: checkbox lists; live login validation; dynamic form rows; server-side processing progress indicators; list reordering using drag and drop; and more… As always, there are a lot of terrible ways to achieve those, several decent ones, and precious few really good takes. This session will review several such use cases and detail various ways to implement them, contrasting the ugly and the beautiful, showing useful reflexes and rules of thumb, with a special focus on performance and maintenance.

Presented by Christophe Porteneuve on Day Two

Comet and Highly Interactive Websites

As the web gets more social, things change faster. As we get more Ajax, people stay on pages longer. Clearly there is a growing need for a way to automatically update web pages as they are being viewed. This presentation digs into the techniques behind Comet, the Bayeux protocol, and several open source Ajax libraries.

This talk looks at why Comet is applicable to a growing set of websites, why it is hard to implement from scratch and the available solutions to make using it on any website easy.

The presentations will talk through several examples and use-cases.

Presented by Joe Walker on Day Two

Discussion Panel

@media Ajax speakers will discuss a series of questions relating to the current hot issues in the worlds of JavaScript and Ajax.

Panellists Dean Edwards plus others TBC on the day. Taking place on Day Two

Faster than Light JavaScript

What will JIT (just-in-time) compilation mean for JavaScript performance? See live demos and hear release plans for a Firefox-ready upgraded JavaScript engine, code-named 'TraceMonkey' based on the SpiderMonkey interpreter and the Tamarin-Tracing VM. Learn about the new JavaScript 2 (ECMAScript Edition 4) features being implemented in Mozilla's engines. See advanced canvas-based rendering demos that take advantage of the new speed and features.

Presented by Brendan Eich on Day One

Making your jQuery Code Modular

Get up-to-date with current best practices for developing lean, efficient and reusable code with jQuery. Almost all long-time jQuery users use the plugin architecture to build modularity into their code, so you don't need to be developing a plugin for mass-release to find this talk useful.

In this session, we examine the basic hook that all plugins use and dive into the element data store, custom events, and the new setup and teardown feature for jQuery's events. Included is a demonstration where we build a full auto-complete plugin in 100 lines of code or less.

Presented by Yehuda Katz on Day Two

OpenSocial and the Technologies that Power it

OpenSocial launched with a big bang in late 2007 and has since been integrated into numerous social networking sites, such as MySpace, Hi5, and Orkut. The "social" aspect is only one part of this standard; just as important, it defines a host environment where gadgets - embedded Ajax apps - can be deployed, and it defines various services those widgets can access.

This presentation will outline the OpenSocial ecology, architecture, and programming model. It will identify the emerging technologies powering OpenSocial, such as OAuth, cross-domain iframe communication, and Caja.

Presented by Michael Mahemoff on Day One

Reusable JavaScript

JavaScript applications can be hacked together in a relatively short amount of time with minimal preparation. Creating robust, fast and friendly JavaScript is a bit harder. Superb libraries and frameworks are now commonplace, but what makes them stand out from the crowd?

In this session we'll look at how to write JavaScript that you and other developers will want to use again and again, drawing on our experiences developing Glow, a JavaScript library for the BBC. We'll look at what existing libraries do right, and the lasting damage browsers can have on the human mind.

Presented by Jake Archibald on Day One

Scripting Enabled

The relationship of JavaScript and accessibility has never been a good one. A lot of myths circulating around the use and capabilities of assistive technology branded JavaScript as a bad technology and Ajax as a total faux pas. This is changing as a lot of companies now open their systems to developers with APIs that are Ajax and JavaScript driven. This session will explain how some of these can be used to make data available to users with disabilities that were blocked out before. Accessibility is first and foremost about removing barriers for users, regardless of ability. Using JavaScript and Ajax to work around accessibility issues of rich media applications is one way of doing that. It is like creating mash-ups to test out some APIs - only that the benefit is much higher than just proving a point.

Presented by Christian Heilmann on Day One

Taming The Beast: Managing Complexity In Ajax Applications

Web applications are often complex beasts but when you introduce Ajax into the mix things can get really out of control. This session will help you unravel the wires of your application and reveal techniques and tools to keep your Ajax heavy applications simple, maintainable and robust. It will cover managing the state between client and server, ways of writing maintainable JavaScript, performance considerations, common client/server interaction patterns and taking advantage of server and client-side frameworks.

You will come away with a set of best practices for developing Ajax applications but also knowing when to break the rules.

Presented by Dan Webb on Day Two

Updating the Web with Gears

Gears started out with three components: A Database API to expose a full SQLite engine for storage, LocalServer to proxy content when offline, and a WorkerPool API for thread-like behaviour in JavaScript. All of these components enable more than offline, they are tools in your toolbox for more responsive user experiences on the Open Web.

Since then, we have released new versions that upgrade the components, and add news one such as a Desktop API. We have other great things in the works such as APIs for: Notifications, Audio, FileSystem, ResumableHTTP, and much more.

See how they all maps into HTML 5, and let's see where we can take the Web from here.

Presented by Dion Almaer on Day One

When Ajax Attacks! JavaScript security fundamentals

Web application security is hard, and getting harder. New technologies and techniques mean new vulnerabilities, and keeping on top of them all is a significant challenge. This talk will dive deep in to the underbelly of JavaScript security, exploring topics ranging from basic cross-site scripting to CSRF, social network worms, HTML sanitisation, securing JSON, safe cross-domain JavaScript and more besides.

Presented by Simon Willison on Day Two

Wireframing Ajax Interactions

Modern, cutting-edge web sites and applications have exposed a demand for richer, more nuanced forms of interaction, posing new challenges for today's designers and developers. This session will examine how wireframing - one of the user experience designer's most readily used tools - is evolving to meet these demands.

The creation of modern web applications involves designing intricate patterns, such as state-change and ajax-like behaviour. These designs need to be documented and user-tested quickly and efficiently. Using real-world examples, this session will show how wireframes, in the form of non-functional HTML prototypes, can be the ideal solution to both design and documentation. It will demonstrate how JavaScript frameworks can enable designers to create interactive wireframes which communicate more effectively with both clients and developers. Wireframing and prototyping have long been the lynchpin of user experience design. This talk will demonstrate why, with a little evolution, this is still the case.

Presented by Richard Rutter on Day One