Speaker: September 2009 Archive

Prototype's co-maintainer Tobie Langel will talk about Unittesting JavaScript with Evidence at JSConf.eu.

Evidence is a new, framework-agnostic unit testing library which I developed out of necessity and frustration with the existing offering. Although it's heavily inspired by it's Ruby, Python and Java couterparts, Evidence is packed with niceness targeted at the specificities of the JavaScript language and its different environments.

Hopefully this introduction to Evidence will give you the motivation, tools and knowledge to start unit testing your JavaScript code if you are not doing so already.

Tobie's Bio:
Tobie Langel is a web consultant specialized in front-end programming and user interface architecture. His clients include corporate giants, one-man startups and about everything in between.

Tobie co-maintains Prototype, one of the most successful JavaScript framework, which notably powers Apple's MobileMe, 37Signals' web apps or the Palm's Pre phone. He is also working on a number of other open-source projects such as Google's Caja, PDoc or the soon to be released Bridal and Evidence libraries.

When he's not busy helping make the web a better place, Tobie's usually found on the road or in the studio drumming for some of Switzerland's finest jazz bands.

Remy Sharp (who is also doing the Full Frontal JavaScript conference (which we highly recommend)) will be talking about the HTML5 JavaScript APIs.
HTML5 is all the rage with the cool kids, and although there's a lot of focus on the new language, there's lots of interesting new JavaScript APIs both in the HTML5 spec and separated out. This presentation will take you through demos and code behind the new JavaScript APIs, and explore where these features can be used.

Remy's bio
Remy Sharp is a developer, author, speaker and blogger. Remy started in web development 10 years ago as the sole developer for a finance web site, and as such, was exposed to all aspects running the web site during, and long after, the dotcom boom.

Today he runs his own Brighton UK based development company called Left Logic, coding and writing about JavaScript, jQuery, HTML5, CSS, PHP, Perl and anything else he can get his hands on.

Some links of interest: JS Bin, HTML5 demos and HTML5 Doctor (where Remy is a contributing author).

We are honored to have Steve Souders speak about JavaScript in-the-browser performance!

Steve works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. He previously served as Chief Performance Yahoo!. Steve is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. He created YSlow, the performance analysis plug-in for Firefox. He serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O'Reilly, and is co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. He recently taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford University.

"Even Faster Web Sites"
Web 2.0 is adding more and more content to our pages, especially features that are implemented in Ajax. But our web applications are evolving faster than the browsers that they run in. We don't have to rely on or wait for the release of new browsers to make our web applications faster. In this session, Steve Souders discusses web performance best practices from his second book, Even Faster Web Sites. These time-saving techniques are used by the world's most popular web sites to create a faster user experience, increase revenue, and reduce operating costs. Steve provides technical details about reducing the pain of JavaScript, as well as secrets for making your page load faster in emerging markets where network connectivity is a challenge.

Steve might also have some time to talk about the JS behind his new tool SpriteMe and maybe (but just maybe) we might even have a contest in massively parallel JavaScript loading with Getify :)

Kyle Simpson, aka Getify, will be talking about "Loading JavaScript: Even a caveman can do it."

No matter how awesome your JavaScript code is, we all face the same problem: how to squeeze it down the wire and get it loaded and running in the browser as quickly and efficiently as possible. There are about as many ways to approach this problem as there are developers trying to solve it, which makes the landscape of JavaScript Loading solutions confusing and painful to navigate. But it doesn't have to be so ugly. We're gonna break it down so you can come away feeling more confident in how best to load your JavaScript. Several common strategies will be covered, including:

• Build-time versus on-the-fly techniques
• Code organization/compression (minification, gzip, etc)
• File concatenation
• Inline scripts
• Dynamic parallel loading of JavaScript resources (LABjs, etc)
• Cache optimization (initialization profiling, on-demand loading, pre-fetching, etc)

Kyle's bio:
Kyle Simpson is a UI architect from Austin, TX. He is passionate about user experience, specifically optimizing the UI to be as responsive, efficient, secure, and scalable as possible. He considers JavaScript the ultimate language and is constantly tinkering with how to push it further. If something can't be done in JavaScript, he's bored by it. He has a number of open-source projects, including flXHR, LABjs, mpAjax, and jXHR, and he also is a core contributor to SWFObject.

We are proud to announce that Kevin Dangoor who started the CommonJS project will speak at JSConf.eu about:

CommonJS: JavaScript vs. Ruby, Python, Java, etc.

JavaScript is an enormously popular programming language, because of its unique place as the programming language of the web. Outside of that domain, JS is barely a blip compared to other dynamic languages like Python and Ruby. Outside of the browser, JavaScript is lacking something critical: a significant standard library.

Thanks to a powerful standard library and a common module system, sophisticated applications can be written in Python and run unchanged on Windows, Mac and Linux and even across different interpreters including Jython and IronPython.

The CommonJS project (formerly ServerJS) is building up a standard library API to give privileged JavaScript applications this same kind of interop. Imagine a server-side webapp that runs equally well in Rhino, SpiderMonkey and v8. We're getting there. Even better, those apps can easily share modules between the browser and the server, which is something you don't get in other languages.

In this talk, I'll provide quick background on the project and demos of several implementations of the emerging standard, including how CommonJS impacts Mozilla's Jetpack and Bespin projects.

About Kevin:
Kevin has been a "software product guy" for more than 20 years. Though he's worked with many languages in many environments, he is best known for his Python work as the founder of the TurboGears web framework and Paver project scripting tool. He has spoken at numerous conferences and is a co-author of Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears. Most recently, he works at Mozilla Labs where he works on the Bespin in-browser developer tool project and started the CommonJS project. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan and recently has help start the a2 web developer interest group.

Ryan Dahl will present on his uber-awesome node.js server side JavaScript platform.

Here's a short biography:
Ryan is an American freelance programmer living in of Germany. His work invariably involves interruptible parsers, event loops, and response time histograms. He is the creator of several open source projects including the Ebb web server and the "EY" load balancer module for Nginx.

And this what he will be talking about:

Node.js, Evented I/O for V8 Javascript

It is well known that event loops rather than threads are required for high-performance servers. Javascript is a language unencumbered of threads and designed specifically to be used with synchronous evented I/O, making it an attractive means of programming server software. Node.js ties together the V8 Javascript compiler with an event loop, a thread pool for making blocking system calls, and a carefully designed HTTP parser to provide a browser-like interface to creating fast server-side software. This talk will explain Node's design and how to get started with it.