So I’m a bit late on wrapping this up, but with so much to absorb from day two, I’m sure you can understand. Day two of JSConf 2009 was just as incredible as day one, granted, everyone was a bit sluggish from the “beer track” the night before, there was still an abundance of quality (and entertaining) presentations on various topics.
James Duncan (@jamesduncan) from Joyent gave an excellent talk on “JavaScript Platform as a Service” and the economics associated with it. Duncan made an excellent correlation to using web technology related services very much like one would pay for electricity: you should only pay for what you use, a solid argument against adding additional data centers, servers, and the like. The concept behind his Platform as a Service (PaaS) is not necessarily new, but it’s association with JavaScript is. Duncan claims there are “tons of money being spent to make JavaScript super fast,” and “the world is really changing” in regards to JavaScript. Looking forward to what comes of this.
Easily the most entertaining presentation was by Brian Leroux (@brianleroux) from Nitobi on Phonegap. Just check the second slide and you’ll see why his presentation woke the crowd up.
If you are not familiar with Phonegap, you should be. With all the fragmentation between mobile operating systems and how we developers loathe said fragmentation, Phonegap comes to the rescue by allowing you to develop in your native environment (e.g. HTML,CSS,Javascript) and allows your app will work on multiple mobile platforms. Pretty ingenious and not very well known, which is baffling to me. Most iPhone developers, I believe, would prefer their app to work on the Android phones and Blackberries as well, yet there doesn’t seem to be a large adoption to Phonegap…yet. I believe JSConf, with the incredibly bright and influential minds that were there, will help push this abstraction SDK further in the mobile dev community.
Some highlights that stood out to me from the other talks included the concept of hyperlinking/JSON referencing in a REST Architecture and Persevere by Kris Zyp, some remedial website performance related topics by Stoyan Stefanov (author of Object Oriented JavaScript), an excellent introduction by Richard Worth on the jQuery UI framework, a high-energy presentaiton of the Sproutcore framework by Mike Subelsky, and finally a truly thorough and comprehensive presentation of the true depth of the Dojo framework by Peter Higgins (@phiggins).
I could go on and on about the presentations and the mental stimulation gained from this conference, but I would never get to work on time. If you are a serious JavaScript engineer, you would be remiss to not attend next year’s JSConf. The content and quality of the conference overall was by far the best I’ve ever experienced.
