Sessions

Ajax at Work: A Case Study

This session studies a moderately complex real-world Ajax application. It will discuss several important aspects:

• What are the advantages of Ajax? Why can't we use normal web pages?
• How do we structure the data? Do we use XML, HTML, or JSON?
• What about accessibility?
• And a few tricky technical details…

The case study will give you an idea of the kind of questions that have to be answered before starting to work on an Ajax application.

Presented by Peter-Paul Koch on Day One

Building Interactive Prototypes with jQuery

The prototyping process is a delicate dance of writing the smallest amount of code needed to create a compelling demo. This challenge is compounded by the fact that designers typically have to wait on their development teams for, seemingly simple, results. Why not circumvent the whole process by writing your own interactive JavaScript code using a JavaScript library, jQuery, that understands how unobtrusive, CSS-based, design works.

This will be a hands-on demonstration, so please bring your laptop.

Presented by John Resig on Day Two

But I'm a Bloody Designer!

So we spent years learning our craft - specialising - reading the CSS specs in bed, hardwiring the Photoshop keyboard shortcuts into our brains, working up a usability test subject patter and playing with sticky notes. Then along came Ajax. Until that point we could safely silo ourselves, locked away in our niche specialities. But producing good _applications_ requires more than that. Yes, we need our specialist skills but without a thorough understanding of both ends of the Ajax equation the result will be an unholy mess.

Interface designer Mike Stenhouse will discuss how his working life has changed, what we need to know to produce good applications for the modern web and how many times he's thrown his toys out of his pram and whined "But I'm a bloody designer!"

Presented by Mike Stenhouse on Day One

Dojo 1.0: Great Experiences For Everyone

Ajax toolkits like Dojo fill in the semantic potholes left by browsers and by HTML. Used well they let us express more easily, more beautifully, and with more degradability, how our application should be structured and indeed what it is.

This talk examines how Dojo helps give us these new semantics so that we can type what we mean and get what we want. From iterating with designers faster through accessibility, progressive enhancement, and degradability concerns all the way through packaging and deployment, we examine how Dojo makes your modules and packages first-class citizens thereby letting you build better, more sophisticated experiences for everyone.

Presented by Alex Russell on Day Two

How To Destroy The Web

In your hands you hold a very powerful weapon. Convention, usability, and web standards are the realm of namby-pamby do-gooders.

Let's take a look at how you can worm your way into the new wave of Ajax web design and destroy it from the inside.

Alternatively, you might think of this presentation as a list of things to not do; how to avoid common pitfalls, resist temptations, and fight the evils of The Dark Side.

Presented by Stuart Langridge on Day One

JavaScript: The Good Parts

JavaScript is a language with more than its share of bad parts. It went from non-existence to global adoption in an alarmingly short period of time. It never had an interval in the lab when it could be tried out and polished.

But it also has some extraordinarily good parts. In JavaScript there is a beautiful, elegant, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders. Unfortunately, the best nature of JavaScript was so effectively hidden that for many years the prevailing opinion of JavaScript was that it was an unsightly, incompetent toy.

In this presentation Douglas Crockford will expose the goodness in JavaScript, an outstanding dynamic programming language. He believes that the elegant subset he has carved out is vastly superior to the language as a whole, being more reliable, readable, and maintainable.

Presented by Douglas Crockford on Day Two

JavaScript 2 and The Open Web

Brendan Eich, the father of JavaScript, will demonstrate JavaScript 2 running in an early technology demonstration only version of Firefox, built from the Mozilla 2 repository using the Tamarin virtual machine. He will also demonstrate and discuss advanced graphics and video support on the web, using open standards and open source software. To close Brendan will look forward to where this optimised programming language and rendering support in Firefox will lead the Open Web.

Presented by Brendan Eich on Day Two

Metaprogramming JavaScript

Metaprogramming, writing code that augments itself at runtime, is a very powerful technique gaining popularity in scripting languages like Python and Ruby but surely little old JavaScript isn't flexible enough to do this? Think again. In this presentation, we'll deconstruct the features of JavaScript that allow metaprogramming then move on to combining these to produce elegant solutions to real world tasks. In the process, we'll take an in-depth look at closures, functional programming, prototype inheritance and more. Bring your best brain, you'll need it.

Presented by Dan Webb on Day Two

Real World Accessibility for Ajax-enhanced Web Apps

In this session we'll take a look at how we've failed in the past to create accessible, Ajax-enhanced applications, what we can do right now to help and where we're headed for creating accessible, usable applications for the future.

Presented by Derek Featherstone on Day One

Planning JavaScript and Ajax for Larger Teams

There is no lack of information about how to implement Ajax and use JavaScript on web products. A lot of this information is however based on the assumptions that the developer team is either an army of one or all on the same skill level.

This session will discuss some of the non-technological steps involved in planning your scripts and solutions to work with larger or even distributed teams without resulting in a maintenance nightmare.

Presented by Christian Heilmann on Day One

The State of Ajax

In 2005, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith founded Ajaxian.com to track the nascent Ajax space. It's been a wild ride as the state-of-the-art has progressed from the XHR API to feature-rich JavaScript frameworks like Prototype, Dojo, jQuery and others. Come join Ben and Dion as they discuss the latest developments in the Ajax landscape and highlight effective ways to do modern Ajax development (at least, as they stand that week).

Presented by Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith on Day One

Discussion Panel

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

Moderated by Jeremy Keith on Day Two