Development Track | Web Directions USA

Development Track

Tom Hughes-Croucher introduces us to Server-side JavaScript; Jonathan Stark says it’s all about Location, Location, GeoLocation; Nicole Sullivan can integrate Object Oriented CSS; Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis bakes us up some HTML5; Brian Fling designs and builds Mobile Apps with Web Standards; Doug Schepers looks at SVG today and tomorrow; Nicholas Zakas makes your JavaScript High Performance and Michael Mahemoff takes HTML5 offline.

Optimizing Facebook – integrating OOCSS

Presenter: Nicole Sullivan

In 2009, Facebook committed to improving their site speed, six months later, they had cut their response time in half. In this session, Nicole will discuss the practical steps they took to make their goal a reality including pipelining, UI component creation, and JavaScript progressive enhancement.

She will cover the technical details of how they moved from organic style sheet kudzu to Object Oriented CSS. After this talk, you will know how to diagnose the particular architectural problems in your CSS and choose a solution that fits. In addition, you will have the tools to end the “specificity wars” and get your team writing lean, efficient, and fast style sheets.

HTML5 Offline, and On

Presenter: Michael Mahemoff

HTML5 introduces several so-called “offline” technologies: application caching, local storage, and file access, to name a few. But these technologies are not just for purely offline apps; they boost startup performance, overcome network outages, and partition content away from the server. This talk will explain how you can incorporate these technologies into your work today and identify the features browsers will be supporting in the near future.

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.

An introduction to Server-side JavaScript

Exploring the other side of 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.

Designing and Building Mobile Apps with Web Standards

Tools and techniques for web developers

Presenter: Brian Fling

With so much discussion about mobile applications these days, we tend to forget that the Web is the only cross platform application framework that works across all mobile devices. Mobile expert Brian Fling and author of O’Reilly’s Mobile Design and Development, will explain how to design and build a Hybrid App, using web technologies like HTML, CSS & Javascript to create a deployable cross platform mobile application.

This talk will consist of three parts: when to build a Hybrid App over a native application, how and when to leverage web app frameworks like jQTouch & MooTouch and finally how to deploy your Hybrid App using tools like PhoneGap & Rhomobile and others.

High Performance JavaScript

Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency!

Presenter: Nicholas Zakas

Ever wonder why the page appears frozen or why you get a dialog saying, “this script is taking too long”? Inside of the browser, JavaScript and the page’s UI are very intertwined, which means they can affect each other and, in turn, affect overall page performance. Ensuring the fastest execution time of JavaScript code isn’t about geek cred, it’s about ensuring that the user experience is as fast and responsive as possible. In a world where an extra second can cost you a visitor, sluggishness due to poor JavaScript code is a big problem. In this talk, you’ll learn what’s going on inside the browser that can slow JavaScript down and how that can end up creating a “slow page”. You’ll also learn how to overcome the conspiracy against your code by eliminating performance bottlenecks.

HTML5-baked, half-baked, or ready for the table?

The latest ingredients for spicing up your site

Presenter: Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis

The cooks are still in the kitchen, but the enticing smells of HTML5 are filling the room. Will the dinner be deliciously decadent or a recipe for disaster? Some of the items on the menu are quite exotic and only for the most adventurous-still, there is a tasty semantic progression from X/HTML to HTML5 that’s sure to have mark-up connoisseurs salivating. In this session, Stephanie will serve up a filling buffet of savory structural elements, flavorful form markup, and succulent ways of presenting audio and video with a focus on satisfying your cravings for tomorrow’s technologies through practical implementations today. Bon appétit!

Location, location, geolocation

From 0 to 100 with APIs, services and a map

Presenter: Jonathan Stark

For users, mobile computing is characterized by a high degree of immediacy, personalization, and contextual awareness – made possible in large part by location based services. For developers, building mobile apps is a great opportunity, but a daunting challenge due to unprecedented platform fragmentation.

Follow along as Jonathan builds a cross-platform, location-based mobile app using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, in conjunction with popular geolocation web services. You will learn how to access a user’s location on various mobile devices, to convert a geocode to a physical address, and to display local points of interest on a map.

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