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A great conference is over! The Ajax Experience took place from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1 2008 in Boston and was packed with great talks - sometimes four of them in parallel! So it was very hard to decide between learning about security (beyond XSS and SQL injection!), the newest Ajax frameworks (i.e. Cappuccino - check out 280Slides, it's worth it!) or performance improvements (Steve Souders had great stuff again!).

So it's really hard to give a recap of what happened - so much things have been going on. One item I take for me as programmer is about how to improve my designs - it's all about CRAP.

• Contrast
• Repetition
• Alignment
• Proximity

A lot of different effects can be achieved by just focusing on these four items and that's one of the reasons why this Website is now a bit lighter than it was before the conference ;)

Another interesting session has been "Top 10 browser issues" with quirksmode.org creator ppk. On stage with him the persons behind the four major JavaScript frameworks Prototype (Andrew Dupont), Dojo, YUI and jQuery (John Resig).
This session was a pretty good overview about where the projects will be heading and what you can expect from them in the future - because in the end it depends on a single person...

Regarding performance improvements I want to highlight SmushIT.com, a new Web application (and a Firefox plugin) that automatically optimizes images for Web sites. Great, simple and just working. It's good to see new tools coming up that simplify tasks which had to be performed manually a year ago - another great sample is Hammerhead. Also note that Yahoo added 20 additional rules to their existing 14 "golden" performance rules.

Finally I wanna restate the sentence from the beginning of this post - "A great conference is over!". It gave a great overview about what is happening in the Web 2.0 world and fostered networking with other developers outside of the own company!

Labels: conference, english, tech, usa, web

The jQuery Camp 2008, which has been held today at the Stata Center at the MIT, is over. It has been organized by the creator of the library, John Resig - who did a great job - with the library and with the conference!

While John opened the day with news about the current jQuery status, planned changes, internals and not-so-well-known features of the core he also mentioned:

"I haven't done any serious Web development in a long time..."

Which obviously nobody in the crowd believed.

Afterwards other speakers talked about scalable applications, jQuery UI and jQuery Plugin development. At least in the advanced track the quality of the talks was pretty high, except for one exception, where downloading and installing the framework would have had the same effect... completely wrong for an advanced audience to just explain the basic samples delivered with the framework. Punished by typing noise (80% MacBooks, 20% others).

One of the highlights was the talk about processing.js, a port of the Processing visualization language, which clearly showed what is possible with todays JavaScript and current browsers (including IE!).

Overall a great day together with the jQuery community and the jQuery developers at the MIT! Looking forward to next years conference!

(Photo source)

Labels: conference, english, jquery, travel, web

The jQuery Conference is going to take place on September 28, 2008, in Boston. Finally the Conference Agenda was posted - containing a beginner and an advanced track, great speakers and interesting topics. To be able to choose tracks at the event just import this iCal agenda file and synchronize it to your mobile device. I'll update the file as updates are released.

Labels: conference, jquery, usa, web