Development Track | Web Directions South 2011

Development Track

This year we’ve put together dev sessions that would hold their ground at any developer event: CoffeeScript creator Jeremy Ashkenas is playing with JavaScript; Addy Osmani knows the essential JavaScript design patterns; Ryan Seddon surveys the remote debugging landscape; Julio Cesar Ody build killer mobiles apps with CSS3 and Backbone.js; Damon Oehlman serves up some piping hot and very tasty HTML5 API soup.

And that’s only the beginning: watch this space as the rest of the development track fills out.

Essential JavaScript Design Patterns

Presenter: Addy Osmani

Would you like to learn how to improve the efficiency of your JavaScript code, keep it DRY and ensure it’s well-organized?. Design patterns are useful, reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems in software development and in this talk you’ll learn how you can apply them to any serious JavaScript project. The most useful patterns for modern web application development will also be highlighted in this session and you’ll even be introduced to how you can harness patterns to improve collaborative coding in teams.

HTML5 API Soup — Recipes for Maximum Taste

Presenter: Damon Oehlman

Most jaw-dropping apps use multiple HTML5 APIs in creative ways, rather than a single API in isolation. In this session we will explore ways you can implement and combine HTML APIs such as websockets, web workers, local storage, and geolocation to make awesome web apps. Then just for fun we’ll look at how you can dish up something really special by throwing in ingredients like canvas, video and WebGL.

CSS3 and Backbone.js for killer mobile apps

Presenter: Julio Cesar Ody

Learn how to build great looking and high performance mobile web applications leveraging CSS3 animations and Backbone.js, along with some cool use cases for geolocation and localStorage.

This session will describe in length a boilerplate you can use for developing your own apps aimed at A grade mobile devices and tablets.

Hot coffee? Playing with JavaScript

Presenter: Jeremy Ashkenas

CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. It’s a thought experiment that aims to test how far we can stretch JavaScript semantics without adding any runtime libraries or outputting reams of generated code. To that end, there are three main aspects beyond what JavaScript provides: A clarified syntax, bonus language features, and a handful of semantic cleanups. Recommended for folks who are interested in languages that run in the browser as well as the server.

Remote debugging landscape

Presenter: Ryan Seddon

More and more as front-end developers we are presented with new challenges, with the explosion of the mobile web it has created a whole new territory. How do we test the vast array of devices out there? And what tools can help us make this a painless experience?

Testing web apps on mobile devices is a new challenge not yet fully explored. Let’s brush over the beginnings of web application testing and debugging and dive into current solutions for remote debugging. In this session we’ll cover what developers and browser vendors are doing to help tackle this problem, including some of the tools available to use today, and how some of these tools work internally and what the future may hold.

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