Have you got a little something to share? Either something cool that you’ve seen, or a pet project of your own? Come and tell us all about it, in 4 minutes (+ 3 mins for questions).
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Now on the 2nd and 4th Thursday of the month
Async sessions are now on every 2nd and 4th Thursday of the month… (and not every 2 weeks, as they were previously)
#8: Drawing In The Browser, with Canvas
In this session, Jon Linklater-Johnson will be teaching us all how to draw, using the Canvas element, which is part of the HTML5 suite of new web technologies.
Jon will cover almost everything you need to know about the Canvas API, with a look at Processing.js and maybe one or two of the other drawing frameworks. We’ll look at why SVG might sometimes be a better for your project and how Raphaël.js can help. Finishing up with some demos of the crazy cool stuff that people have built and how they did it.
#7: Unit Testing in JavaScript
Learn to test your Javascript code automatically with QUnit, the jQuery testing framework. Using the hands-on code supplied, you’ll learn how automated testing can ease working with other developers (and future versions of yourself).
Dan Glegg works as Lead Architect at Videojuicer, and is the creator of Tails, a bugtracking application for small teams. Dan works with Ruby, JavaScript and ActionScript in his projects. You can see Dan’s open source work at github.com/danski
#6: A Rough Guide to JavaScript Performance
Slow loading websites, unresponsive pages, spinning beachballs of death – sometimes our efforts to use JavaScript to bring some life to our web pages inadvertently ends up killing them instead. But fear not! There are plenty of simple things you can do to improve the performance of the JavaScript on your site, and without having to be a 10th Dan JavaScript blackbelter either.
This session, given by Mark Perkins, will be about giving some practical tips and advice on how to make sure your JavaScript is helping your pages, not hindering them. And rather than going deep into arcane language optimisations, we’ll be laying down some simple ground rules for quickly and easily optimising loadtime and runtime performance to hit your slow JS where it hurts.
#5: JavaScript Surgery
Have you got a JavaScript problem you need fixing? Or something that you don’t understand?
Or do you just simply like talking about and sharing help with JavaScript?
This informal session is all about giving and receiving help. Or simply getting together with your co-scripters.
Let the surgery begin…
#4: Using CSS3 Transitions & Animations
This session, led by Aron Carroll, will explore the use of CSS transitions and animations as an alternative to traditional JavaScript methods. While animations are still a proposed part of the CSS3 spec enough browsers have now added support that it is worth considering them a tool for use in your projects.
The talk will cover implementation of CSS animations in both CSS and JavaScript, browser coverage, progressive enhancement for unsupported browsers and a look into current limitations of the specification. Having some knowledge of both CSS and JavaScript will be useful but should not be necessary to follow the talk.
#3: The Geo API in iPhone & Android
While contemplating the rise in obesity amongst young people, Richard Vahrman wondered if people could be encouraged to exercise by creating computer games that could be played outdoors. With the availability of cheap GPS units inside and associated with mobile phones, Richard formed a company, LocoMatrix, and working with other local companies created games that could be played on a variety of mobile phones.
With the advent of the iPhone, the stakes changed and people have really started to embrace location-based applications. Around 18 months ago, and in association with Brighton University, LocoMatrix was awarded a grant to create an educational game for schools. Invisible Buildings is the result, an archaeological game whereby primary children get the opportunity to take part in a virtual “dig” and excavate a Roman Villa.
#2: JavaScript Show n’ Tell
Have you got a little JavaScript discovery to share? Or a pet project, or an interesting app that you’ve seen and want to tell us about? Come and share it with all the people…
Each slot will be just 5 minutes (+ 2 mins for questions).
Please let us know in the comments if there’s something you’d like to share.
#1: Getting started with Node.js – Simon Willison
Did you ever want to use your client-side skills to let rip on the server? Or are you a back-end developer who wants to add JavaScript to your server-side toolkit? Then this is the event for you.
This 90 minute workshop will provide a thorough developer’s introduction to Node.js.
Node is an extremely high performance server-side programming framework based on Google Chrome‘s lightning fast V8 engine. It solves the same problems as server-side tools such as PHP, Django or Ruby on Rails, using JavaScript as the programming language and with a focus on non-blocking, highly concurrent event-based I/O.
This makes it an excellent fit for problems requiring long-running connections – things like Comet, HTML5 WebSockets, large file uploads and combining results from unpredictable third party web services. As a result, Node makes an excellent complement to existing server-side technologies.
