Web Directions Code 2012 Schedule

Our medium has entered its third dec­ade of exist­ence, and is ready for some grow­ing up. Our defin­i­tions and under­stand­ing of the web are rap­idly get­ting out of date, as, too, are our prac­tices for build­ing on it. It is time to re-evaluate where things are and, more import­antly, where they are going.

Where once web pages were sand­boxed, with little if any access to the under­ly­ing device cap­ab­il­it­ies, increas­ingly, this is no longer the case.
From the first steps of geo­loca­tion, which enables any web site or applic­a­tion to ask the browser for a user's loc­a­tion, an increas­ing range of device fea­tures are beging exposed in the DOM: the file sys­tem, cam­era, gyrosopes, address book, com­passes and more.
In this ses­sion, Dave John­son, ori­gin­ator of the PhoneGap pro­ject delves into HTML5 and related device APIs, enabling us to build richer, more sophisticated applic­a­tions in the browser.

Stuck in the land of DOM-based event hand­ling in your JS code? While jQuery (and other lib­rar­ies) help ease the pain, they don't solve all the prob­lems.
This ses­sion will explore mod­ern JS event lib­rar­ies that will change the way you archi­tect and build your apps forever.

As the major­ity of web users shift to touch devices, the expect­a­tion is becom­ing that everything becomes touch­able — includ­ing the mobile web. This ses­sion will provide a prac­tical and prag­matic view of where touch is at from a web stand­ards per­spect­ive and how you can start weav­ing touch inter­ac­tions into your mobile web applications.

Get the low-down on this excel­lent HTML5 fea­ture and learn how you can add it to your own web pro­jects (and why you'd want to!). We'll also look at some of the mis-steps made along the way (like the 2011/12 Twit­ter web interface).

Let's have a look at how new fea­tures such as auto­fo­cus, required fields, nat­ive date pick­ers, place­holder text and pop­ping up tailored key­boards for num­bers and email addresses on mobile devices can make life more enjoyable!

One of the per­ceived bene­fits of "nat­ive" apps is that they can be installed on a device, then run when the user isn't con­nec­ted. But web apps can do this too.
In this ses­sion, John All­sopp will show you how to use HTML5 fea­tures such as app cache and web­Stor­age to cre­ate apps that the user can install, and which will work even when the user is cruis­ing at 30,000 feet with no web connection.
These fea­tures also have the added bonus of help­ing to improve the per­form­ance of web sites and apps as well, and even work in all mod­ern browsers and devices, includ­ing IE8 up!

Each web­site is a product used daily by people to take actions, not just read the con­tent on it. Your product is amorph­ous, it takes the shape of whatever con­tainer it fills: a mobile browser, a touch enabled desktop browser, or a 30″ iMac that is con­nec­ted to the Inter­net via teth­er­ing. Pho­toshop is just one of the means to an end in this new age of util­it­arian web sites.
The new tech­no­lo­gies avail­able in HTML5 already allow you to cre­ate pro­to­types quickly in the browser. Learn how to cre­ate a pro­to­type from start to fin­ish using these new tech­no­lo­gies while tak­ing advant­age of quick pro­to­typ­ing tools.

Some time ago now JavaS­cript stopped being a toy lan­guage and became a ser­i­ous player. Yet when you browse through the pleth­ora of code and dif­fer­ent dis­cus­sions you get the sense that a lot of people, even those who use it every day, are still quite con­fused about the lan­guage — its great power, and your great respons­ib­il­ity toward it as a developer. Demys­ti­fy­ing this is the pur­pose of the entire second day of Web Dir­ec­tions Code, which Dmitry will intro­duce in a key­note you won't for­get for a long time.

In just 30 months, node.js has gone from an obscure toy to the most watched devel­op­ment plat­form on Git­Hub. Once the next stable ver­sion ships, sig­ni­fic­ant focus will move to improv­ing the community-driven eco­sys­tem of mod­ules, mak­ing it easier to nav­ig­ate and con­trib­ute.
In this talk, Jed will intro­duce the two faces of NPM, the offi­cial node.js pack­age man­ager: NPM the eco­sys­tem, for find­ing exist­ing mod­ules and devel­op­ing and pub­lish­ing your own mod­ules, and NPM the tool, for man­aging and stream­lin­ing node.js work­flows for your own projects.

Before we fork out for expens­ive per­form­ance mon­it­or­ing tools What if we took the time to listen to what our browser was try­ing to tell us? We can dis­cover a whole range of fea­tures you may have ignored. Dis­cover how to debug net­work latency issues, memory leaks and other per­form­ance fun in our browsers. With web applic­a­tions becom­ing more like desktop apps, remain­ing open for days at a time. Now is the time to listen to your browsers pain and walk away with a new toolkit of per­form­ance best practices.

Douglas Crock­ford has intro­duced us all to the good parts of JavaS­cript. But what then are "the bad parts"? In this ses­sion, Anette Bergo takes a look at some of JavaScript's odd parts, quirks, and pitfalls.

An in-depth look at how JavaScript's first-class func­tions and lex­ical scope allow us to write power­ful and express­ive code. Through the single topic of imme­di­ately invoked func­tion expres­sions, we'll touch upon func­tion scope, clos­ures, JavaS­cript "classes", Cof­feeScript and ECMAScript 5.

Client-side unit test­ing can be a pain­ful thing to test in all browsers, so as a "lazy developer" I like to do as little as pos­sible. We'll dive into how we can auto­mate this pro­cess and what tools are out there to help us and how I use these on Modernizr.

This 15 minute party may or may not include: when and how to load and run JavaS­cript on page load; JavaS­cript cod­ing con­ven­tions you should adopt; a look at writ­ing call­back ori­ented JavaS­cript and some JavaS­cript per­form­ance tips for fun and profit.

With Angry Birds, Cut the Rope and other block­buster games now work­ing in mod­ern web browsers, it's fair to say nat­ive, browser based gam­ing has arrived for real. But how do they do it? In the ses­sions, Moz­illa Tech­nical Evan­gel­ist Rob Hawkes looks at the fea­tures now in your browsers to help develop games (and other inter­act­ive web based exper­i­ences) includ­ing the Can­vas and WebGL, HTML5 Audio API, Mouse­lock and the Joy­stick API.

Today's web browser is a power­ful applic­a­tion plat­form, chal­len­ging the tra­di­tional respons­ib­il­it­ies of web applic­a­tion server and cli­ent. In this ses­sion we learn to har­ness the browser to do some of the heavy-lifting tra­di­tion­ally del­eg­ated to the server-side.
Push­ing ren­der­ing tasks onto the web browser reduces the amount of hand-holding required of a server, min­im­ising net­work util­isa­tion and lag involved in user inter­ac­tions. This decouples our views from our server imple­ment­a­tion and can improve over­all applic­a­tion per­form­ance. Your web applic­a­tions will feel snappy and light­weight, present­ing a more pleas­ant user experience.
We will explore the implic­a­tions of client-side ren­der­ing and the dif­fer­ences between pop­u­lar client-side tem­plat­ing tools, such as jQuery tem­plates, EJS, Under­score and Handle­bars, eval­u­at­ing com­pat­ib­il­ity, per­form­ance, express­ive­ness and pro­ject health, while com­par­ing stat­ist­ics and user exper­i­ence with tra­di­tional server-side tem­plat­ing techniques.