@media Ajax, London 2007
The floating head of Brendan Eich, originally uploaded by adactio.
2 days, 200 people, 9 talks and one discussion panel later I still have too many things going round in my head to be able to list everything I heard and saw at @media Ajax in London this week.
Speakers included Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript (The floating head of Brendan Eich taken by Jeremy Keith is pictured), ppk (Peter-Paul Koch) on creating a family tree app and why XML may be the answer now but JSON may work better once people have heard about it. John Resig ran through cool stuff on jQuery and Dan Webb enthused and bewildered us on using Prototype and other “hidden” features of JavaScript. Luckily Douglas Crockford was there to fill in the gaps. Christian Heilmann and Stuart Langridge covered working in teams using pairing/Agile/Scrums and Derek Featherstone showed how far he cycled round Lake Placid in training for the Iron Man event during the summer in his accessibility section. From Ajaxian – Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith’s overview of where Ajax is at was comprehensive and the upcoming JavaScript 2.0 and HTML 5 plans raised as many questions as answers.
The upshot seemed to be that whether you use Prototype/scriptaculous, Dojo, jQuery or another of the libraries there’s no one best way to create Ajax applications. And one day browsers will catch up and we won’t need “hacks” to help us achieve our goals.
I’m looking forward to next year already – whatever it will be called!
(Overused phrase of the first day: counter-intuitive)
Phew, good thing I didn’t use that word (I guess I’d stumble over it in a talk anyways).
Good that we filled your head up to the brim, now it is time to digest
Luckily it wasn’t a speaker who used those words! That bar tab certainly helped people though.