Roundup: Nexedi at jQuery UK

On April 19th, 2013, jQuery UK was hosted in Oxford and Nexedi was able to attend. Below you can find a quick roundup of what happened.

Key Take Aways

• About 500 developers attending
• We were able to introduce part of our work (jIO, renderJS, erp5) to members of the JQM/jQuery team
• Interesting sponsors: Cloudant - JSON/CouchDB-mapped database as a service
• Interesting speakers: Ilya Grigorik: How Google speeds up sites using Chrome Developer Tools

Topics

• Brendan Eich (CTO Mozilla): The next javascript
• Richward Worth (jQuery team)": jQuery present and future (Slides)
• Remy Sharp: I know jQuery - now what? (Slides)
• Adam Sontag (jQuery team): jQuery - Swiss Army Knife (Slides)
• Doug Neiner: Machine.js - Stateful machines in Javascript (Slides)
• Ilya Grigorik (Goggle Page Speed): Chrome Developer Tools (Slides)
• John Bender (Adobe, JQM): DOM Manipulation with Category Theory (Slides)
• Joe Petterson: Testing Client Side Applications on legacy browsers (Slides)
• Jason Scott (Blackberry, JQM): Building Experiences vs Frameworks (Slides)

Summary Speeches

Brendan Eich: The next javascript

First part focussing on changes in ECMAScript 6 and beyond. Second part showing how Emscripten and asm.js can be used to compile to javascript, like in this demo (more info on asmjs here) and that the eventually goal for javascript in the browser is to reach "near-native" performance.

Richward Worth: jQuery present and future

jQuery will for the near future be available in two branches. The 2.0 branch drops support for IE6,7,8, because the code necessary to support these browsers produced new errors when working with environments like Phonegap. The 1.9 branch will kept alive and maintained, so there will be a latest version of jQuery which can be used with legacy browsers. (Slides)

Remy Sharp: I know jQuery - now what?

When to use jQuery and when native javascript makes more sense, including examples (Slides)

Adam Sontag: jQuery - Swiss Army Knife

The strength of jQuery is not only its code, but also the community around it. (Slides)

Doug Neiner: Stateful machines in Javascript

Introduced a plugin that enables stateful machines to be used in Javascript.(Slides, Offline/Online Demo)

Ilya Grigorik: Chrome Developer Tools

Showed how Google is using Chrome Canary (experimental Chrome browser - download here) to analyse and improve performance. The presentation showed tricks like how to export waterfalls as JSON HAR (http archive) files and anaylze data in 3rd party applications or how to optimize for "first paint" (first content to be displayed) by flushing content to the browser before the whole page is created (Slides)

John Bender: DOM Manipulation with Category Theory

How to use Category Theory from mathematics for faster DOM manipulation. (Slides)

Joe Petterson: Testing Client Side Applications on legacy browsers

Talked about the problem in developing a large scale application (case study: SureChem) that must run on IE6/7/8 and how difficult it was to set up testing environments. Testing was done using Selenium and Jenkins, with the presentation outlining how to use both in setting up virtual machines for IE6/7/8 (Slides).

Jason Scott: Building Experiences vs Frameworks

How to optimize building applications for mobile devices - from minification to using grunt (Slides).

Concluding

This was the second time, jQuery UK was held and participation almost doubled compared to last year. With the possibility to apply as a speaker (application form), this would maybe also be a good opportunity to market Nexedis JavaScript projects to a larger audience of developers.