I’ve just been over the @mediaAjax drinks, worked through around 670 emails that accumulated in my inbox since last Wednesday and now there is some time to talk about my experience there.
First of all, here are the slides of my talk:
I didn’t cover many technical issues but instead tried to convince some people to recognize that the way you use JavaScript in your team is the most important part of development. It is not important that you write amazing code, but instead it is much more important to work smoothly together to ensure that you can deliver fast and on budget. This is the only thing that keeps us from being able to train and grow developers – we are too busy playing catch-up with estimates and deliveries. Instead we should concentrate on bringing the fun back into developing by working together rather than competing or being the “JavaScript hero” for the rest of the team.
I got some good feedback and I am happy to get more, so if you’ve been there, tell me about it. Even more importantly, if you are considering on taking on some of the ideas, I’d be interested in hearing how that went in your environment.
Generally I have to say that I enjoyed the conference a lot. I was at first disappointed by the lack of wireless but I guess that in the end it made people listen more intently to what the speakers had to say.
My faves:
- Dion and Ben of Ajaxian covered the State of Ajax, and compared the current happenings to a wishlist they’d drafted 2 years ago. It was a fun enough keynote, but I am not too sure about some of the CSS bashing that was going on. It is very interesting to see that while CSS people want to do everything with their technology, a lot of hardcore coders just don’t grok CSS. Hey, the future is hybrids, play technologies to their strengths and allow people who care to do them.
- Derek Featherstone’s “Real World Accessibility for Ajax-enhanced Web Apps” talked about the problems we have in creating rich client application modules like tree menus and how we fail doing them in an accessible manner. It was very entertaining and he had some good real-world photos to drive his points home. My personal favourite was the irony that the stage had a wheelchair ramp that lead nowhere because of the backdrop
- Stuart Langridges “How to destroy the web” was as unique as he is as it was an anti-presentation as to what to do. He ran the devil’s advocate idea of us building web products in the most obtrusive and bloated manner possible as otherwise people would use all the bandwidth for looking at horse porn (his words, not mine). He had a lot of very good points (don’t do this, as it leaves too much bandwidth) and it reminded me of the Vincent Flander’s approach to teaching web development
- John Resig’s introduction to Prototyping with jQuery showed how you can easily take a saved copy of a web site (in this case an Apple page) and enhance it with jQuery after analyzing the HTML structure. This is pretty cool for just showing a product person how a change could feel like and I’ve done it in the past with Greasemonkey scripts.
- Alex Russell of Dojo gave us some food for thought about how libraries should become one voice and talk about the same ideas and overlap in terms of implementation to ensure we all help developers the same way instead of competing. Something I can wholeheartedly agree with.
- Brendan Eich showed the ideas of a “new JavaScript” while Douglas Crockford explained why the “now” JavaScript is actually a cool language as it is.
- Dann Webb showed ways how you can use JavaScript’s trickier parts like prototype and clever uses of the arguments array to enhance the language and do meta programming with it.
All in all I was happy to be part of this and I thought it one of the best conferences if you wanted to learn about JS. I did hear people complain that there wasn’t that much about Ajax, though. To me, Ajax is a methodology, not necessarily a fixed set of technologies, and to cover the whole aspect you’d need to explain both the client and the server architecture. True, this could have been done more, and I also lacked the coverage of Flash Developers as programmers that already use a lot of things that JavaScript2 is promising us.
All in all there were several great finds for me:
- Never sit next to Bruce Lawson, Chris Willison and Stuart Langridge. It is evil but also terribly funny.
- It is great to see that people involved in the development of competing libraries all want the same stuff and really don’t mind the success of the other competitors. Take this down, fanboys and mailing list flamers: we all want to help you and think you should use whatever suits you best, which is not necessarily our stuff.
- The best way to recognize in your server side component if a call came from Ajax and not from a normal page submit is to check the HTTP header. Most libraries send a bespoke identifier!
- Make sure you check if a queen has a jubilee before you go out of the train in the Westminster area.
I hope the people who went also had fun and the others will consider coming to the next conference in the London area. It is great fun and value for money.
