Development Track | @media 2010

Steve Souders can make your web site Even Faster; Jonathan Stark is Building Mobile Apps; Doug Schepers explains SVG for Today and Tomorrow; Tom Hughes-Croucher introduces Server-side JavaScript; Remy Sharp gives us Browsers with Wings and Matt Biddulph is Building Mobile Location Apps.

Presenter:

Matt Biddulph

It’s a great time to be building mobile location apps. Phones with GPS and compasses are now widely deployed, with good mobile data plans available. Projects like Geonames and OpenStreetMap are creating reusable datasets that provide the data backbone for your service. Open source mapping and GIS software is getting better and better.

How do applications like Foursquare, the Dopplr Social Atlas and Twitter (with its new geolocation API features) bring people into the equation? We’ll explore how location data can be improved through the collective intelligence of a social network.

We’ll consider how the interaction design of a service can be as important as its database schema for successful data analysis. We'll highlight the most interesting systems out there, and give a comparison between the different platforms and styles of application available to you.

Building Mobile Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Presenter:

Jonathan Stark

Explore an alternative approach to creating mobile apps. The free PhoneGap framework lets you build native iPhone apps using just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — a technique that also lets you create Android and Blackberry apps from the very same code base.

Discover the pros and cons of this approach as you learn to create native-looking animations with jQTouch and hook into advanced iPhone features (accelerometer, GPS, vibration, and sound) without ever touching Objective-C.

An Introduction to Server-side JavaScript

Presenter:

Tom Hughes-Croucher

Server-side JavaScript has really started to take off, with a number of great projects providing different pieces of the puzzle. This talk will introduce server-side JavaScript and provide an overview of the existing projects as well as some ideas about where it's all going in the future.

Tom will look at how the various JavaScript runtimes, such as V8 and Rhino, affect development and provide their own unique features. You'll also see the standardisation effort of Common.js and why it's shaping how people write server-side JavaScript.

All the leading SSJS frameworks - Node.js, Narwhal, Jaxer - will be discussed as well as some more quirky uses of JavaScript on the server such as CouchDB and YQL.

SVG: Today and Tomorrow

Presenter:

Doug Schepers

Thought SVG was dead? Think again. Once relegated to plug-in status, Scalable Vector Graphics is now spreading rapidly, in browsers, mobiles, and even televisions, with broad native support and graphical script libraries. It's used on major websites like Wikipedia, Google Docs, and the Washington Post. Whether images or apps, standalone or integrated into HTML, CSS, or Canvas, SVG is a powerful tool in a developer or designer toolkit. With full scripting support, animations, and advanced visual effects, SVG lets you reuse skills you already have. Learn how to use SVG to best effect to add standards-based bling to your webapp or site, see what works and what to avoid, and glimpse where the future lies.

Even Faster Web Sites

Presenter:

Steve Souders

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.

Browsers with Wings: HTML5 APIs for webapp developers

Presenter:

Remy Sharp

HTML5 is all the rage with the cool kids, and although there's a lot of focus on the new language, there's plenty for web app developers with new JavaScript APIs both in the HTML5 spec and separated out as their own W3C specifications. This session will take you through demos and code and show off some of the outright crazy bleeding edge demos that are being produced today using the new JavaScript APIs. But it's not all pie in the sky - plenty is useful today, some even in Internet Explorer!

Specifically we'll be looking at scripting the video media element, 2D canvas and some of the mashups we can achieve. How to take our web apps completely offline, going beyond the cookie and HTML5's answer to threading: web workers.

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