It’s over. What? Ah - an weekend of awesomeness. Actually this word is kind of “stylish” among the web-tech-geeks. But obviously it describes the weekend in Berlin simply in the best way. I am talking about the JSCconf which took place November 07th & 08th this year. Let’s see what was goin’ on.
I was arriving Friday at arround 09:30pm in the Hotel and headed immediately to the pre JSCconf party to a place called Bierkombinat in Kreuzberg (a cool part of Berlin). That place was supposed to have a capazity of, let’s say 20 people, but around 60 have been there. Awesome. All the conf organizers, namely Jan Lehnardt (CouchDB), Malte Ubl and Holger Blank (both SinnerSchrader Hamburg) hand been there and had been in a real good mood. At this point, a mega big thank you guy’s for this conference and weekend. Really awesome - again!
It was not too hard to get in touch with other geeks. A big hello to Dave ‘Furf’ Furfero from New York City (MLB), Nico Onken (DOJO) and Tom Hughes-Crocker from San Francisco (YAHOO). We ended up at around 03:00am eating a kebab in the wrong place because Furf did not find the place we were supposed to go (a day later and sober, he found out that we should have been walking to the left instead to the right ;-) - well …). So that was a good beginning.
With really to less sleep I attended around 09:30am and a little late to the #jsconf. I’ m gonna give you a brief (more or less) overview of the talks I heard. Actually I will update this blogpost with some URL’s to slides and videos in the future.
The first talk was about commonjs held by Kris Kowal. commonjs is a serverside javascript implementation. It is still under heavy development but really cool.
Francisco Tolmasky then showed cappucino. Man this is definetely totally amazing what the guy’s at 280north are doing. cappucino is built with ObjectivJ and brings the desktop to the web. Can you imagine creating your slides (like PowerPoint) online? WTF? It’s so cool and I strongly encourage you to check it out. Check it out at 280slides.
Afterwards Remy Sharp presented the stuff we will have in HTML 5. All the cool new tag’s like video. A lot of things will be a lot easier in the future. Unfortunately we have to wait a bit since there are still people using beloved IE6 - for sure it does not support HTML5.
Then we listened to Robert Nyman who gave a brief introduction to JavaScript from scratch. His
clear advice to the audiance was to use JavaScript as JavaScript and not trying to adapt constructs from other languages. He is a big fan of JSON, JSlint and JSMin - stuff created by Douglas Crockford - the keeper of the ECMAScript jewels ;-). Checkout Robert’s slides for getting a lot of good info about the JavaScript basics.
Nico Onken then introduced us with the DOJO JavaScript framework. Actually I once used the YUI framework but we decided to throw it out of eUNIQUE again because we thought, that the performance was too bad. Unfortunately (shame on me) we did not look deep enough into YUI because there are tools to kind of compress the librarys you are invoking. So because of this (wrong) reason I did not have a look to DOJO. But what I can say is, that it look s really cool and it’s possible to create amazing stuff with it. One example has to be mentioned: grid!
Now CouchDB and its Couchapp's. Alex Lang from Upstream Berlin (hi ;-) ) was presenting the usage of Couchapp’s. Couchapp’s are applications built with CouchDB - and I mean only CouchDB. CouchDB is awesome - I mentioned that in other blogposts a lot. Actually Couchapp’s offer the possibility to built applications like a blog, a wiki, a twitterclient or stuff like that simply with CouchDB. Super cool! By the way - super cool and fancy were Alex slides. Everything was zooming and spinning (svg) … woooo …. ;-)
#slides #video
Let’s now come to Malte Ubl’s presentation about JOOSE. He wrote JOOSE (in pure Javascript) to be able to create e.g. classes, mixins or modules like you know it from other OOP Languages like Smalltalk or Ruby. So, it is a meta object system for JavaScript. Actually the idea came from MOOSE what is an object system for PERL to be able to do the same thing. You can do all that inheritance stuff with prototyping in JavaScript but it’s kind of ugly and annoying. Actually he was telling me that he just wanted to see if it’s possible to do it in JavaScript and yes it was. At SinnerSchrader JOOSE is used in big production systems and it’s obviously running really well. I did check it out all ready and have to say - it’s cool and fun.
Maybe you think this was all ready a lot of cool stuff and my brain is spinning like “how should I ever check all this out”. But wait - now we saw Thomas Fuchs. He was writing script.aculo.us (really - this name sucks because I can’t remember it … ;-) ). He was speaking about JavaScript Performance and was presenting a lot of “no go’s” in JavaScript. He was testing really a lot and brought the results for the different browsers to the audience. If you want to learn more about his (and Amy Hoy’s) ideas check out the website JavaScript Rocks!
#slides #video
Well the last talk for this day was held by Douglas Crockford. I think everybody know’s who he is and so he was welcomed like a Rock Star (I think he is kind of in the JavaScript world ;-) ). He was speaking about his work at the ECMAScript committee, what his goal is and which problems occur (for example the blockade from IBM). This was not really related to hacking JavaScript but really interesting because the standardization and development of ECMAScript (JavaScript) is super interesting for all people coding JavaScript.
#slides #video
So this was day 1. After all the talks we were going back to the hotel to get a nap. At around 09:45pm Furf, Kyle Simpson, his wife and me went to the JSConf party. Really a cool place, good finger food, free drinks (yeah!), a lot of geeks and shitty music (in my opinion for sure ;-) - it’s all about taste you know). Hopefully I will find some time soon to write about the talks at the second day.
I hope JSConf will be held next year in Berlin again. Actually I am thinking about attending JSConf in Washington DC April next year. Let’s see …