Client-side Sessions

Client-side topics include cross-browser issues, Ajax history management, Metaweb development, creating a client-side search engines and more.

View all Client sessions or click a title below to read its abstract.

 

Ajax 2.0

with Anne van Kesteren, Opera Software; Member, WebApps and HTML W3C Working Groups

Been wondering what the W3C has been up to in relation to Ajax? Whether HTML5 can be used before 2022? How we make Ajax accessible? This talk will cover soon to be deployed enhancements to XMLHttpRequest, features for offline Web applications, cross-domain communication, and answers to the aforementioned questions.

 

Building Your First Adobe AIR Application

with Kevin Hoyt, Platform Evangelist, Adobe

Is it possible to build a cross-platform desktop application in 15 minutes using only Web technologies and free software? You bet it is with Adobe AIR! In this session we’ll start with nothing, get the AIR SDK, build an application with HTML, CSS and JavaScript that leverages desktop APIs, package the application for deployment, and install it on multiple operating systems. From nothing, to done, on the desktop, across OS, with Adobe AIR and your existing Web development skills.

 

Creating a Client-Side Search Engine with Gears

with Brad Neuberg, Developer, Gears; Creator, Dojo Offline and Dojo Storage

Come see how Gears, an open source plug-in that teaches current Web browsers new tricks, can be used to create a client-side search engine plugged right into your Web page. Learn how to add this functionality to your own Web site, then dive deep into how Gears and the Dojo toolkit were combined to create this client-side search engine.

In this session you learn:

  • Details of Gears and the Dojo toolkit;
  • How to combine Gears with Dojo to create a client-side search engine;
  • How to add this functionality to your own Web site.

 

Defensive, Cross-Browser Coding with Prototype

with Andrew Dupont, Developer, Prototype; Front-end Developer, frog design

Tired of writing code that breaks in IE? This session explores strategies that Prototype users can employ to write code that works in the real world. Prototype 1.6 is a major revision to the Prototype framework and introduces many code idioms.

The process can be broken up into several stages:

  • Diagnosing the problem. Are you using APIs that aren't supported in all browsers? Are you leaking memory or tripping over a performance pothole in IE? Find out how to spot leaks and run benchmarks on your code.
  • Solving the problem. Know how to get around memory leaks. Know where the low-hanging optimization fruit lie, and the simple changes that'll increase performance ten-fold.
  • Managing code complexity. Learn how Prototype makes it easy to tailor code to a particular browser without code-forking.
  • Preventing future problems. "Write tests" is the "eat your vegetables" maxim of JavaScript development - everyone knows they should, but few people do. Writing unit and functional tests isn't as hard as it may seem. Prototype's Test.Unit library lets you run the sort of continuous integration tests that you'll run on your server-side code.

This session shows you how to:

  • Get useful information from ambiguous JavaScript errors thrown by IE;
  • Use Drip or Process Explorer to diagnose IE memory leaks;
  • Use Prototype's unit testing framework to run performance benchmarks in all browsers;
  • Decipher which parts of your code are making things slow;
  • Attack messy, complex, forking JavaScript with some basic code patterns made possible by Prototype.

 

Making Friends with the Browser: Ajax, Back Buttons and Bookmarks

with Brian Dillard, Lead, Really Simple History; RIA Evangelist, Pathfinder

Ajax breaks our fundamental expectations about how back buttons and bookmarks work. Now, however, Ajax history management has been built directly into such frameworks as Dojo, YUI and GWT, not to mention Gmail and other top Web applications. But not all Ajax bookmarking libraries are created equal. Learn how to enable bookmarks and the back button in your Ajax application using the Really Simple History library, which serializes application state in the URL #hash, and dsHistory, and allows the back button to trigger arbitrary JavaScript functions without changing the URL.

In this session you learn:

  • How to master built-in browser controls in Ajax applications;
  • The differences between various browser history managers;
  • The reasons why browser history managers tend to be a little brittle.

 

ShiftSpace and the Open Metaweb

with David Nolen, Lead Developer, ShiftSpace and Dan Phiffer, Co-founder, ShiftSpace

In this session, we introduce the idea of the 'metaweb' and discuss ShiftSpace and the ShiftSpace API. ShiftSpace attempts to unify the growing number of metaweb applications into a cohesive platform through an Open Source API and flexible JSON-based storage Web service.

In this session you see some exciting new code from the forthcoming version 0.11 release. Version 0.11 is completely rewritten and is based on a new, object-oriented architecture that has proved far more extensible and maintainable than the 0.10 release.

Learn how to develop a truly open and social metaweb application in pure Javascript, without having to worry about:

  • Backend development;
  • Firefox XUL Add-On authoring;
  • The many metaweb security issues;
  • Finding a market from scratch;
  • Inventing the metaweb wheel all over again, running through all the problems this type of development suffers from which we (and the Greasemonkey project) have been dealing with since 2005.

This session shows you:

  • The current state of Metaweb development;
  • How to use the free and open source ShiftSpace API;
  • Best practices in metaweb development;
  • How to become a part of the ShiftSpace open source team.

 

State of the Browsers

with Peter-Paul Koch, Founder, QuirksMode.org

Based on the results of his extensive test suites at QuirksMode.org, Peter-Paul Koch (or 'ppk' as you may know him) discusses the current state of the four major browsers' DOM support and give tips and tricks for working around the most serious problems. He also gives vendors advice for future versions of their browsers.