It certainly feels weird, when you think about it, that this year conference was all about adding complexity to your code when the most probable reason why jQuery as so much market share is because of its simplicity.

In the keynote, John Resig said that jQuery constantly gaining share momentum and was something like on 30% of overall websites, on the web. That’s huge. I also personally saw a tendency with others framework to use jQuery at its core for DOM interaction. jQuery is probably more popular than “javascript” itself!

Like Rebecca Murphey once said, if you really looking to do advanced javascript application, you maybe should also look into a more complete framework like Dojo.

Speaking of Rebecca, I was particularly flabbergasted by her talk about code organization and modules. I think I am currently where she was when she started to search for a better path to code organization.

There were also a lot of mentions about lazy script loading with labJS et RequireJS and loose coupling with custom events and pub/sub and other nice jQuery plugins.

I really liked all those talks that were talking about a more advanced way to do jQuery, but when you think that most of the technologies (plugins) presented were less than 1 year old.. I just hope that the “normal” developers mass that is not really following the trends is ready for all of this goodness.

I can really see a line between jQuery developers that want to level up and those that just want to do their “thing” with the DOM.

Some food for thoughts:

• Managing JavaScript Objects – Nicholas Zakas
• Functionality-Focused Code Organization – Rebecca Murphey
• Alex Saxton on javascript and jQuery pattern
• Using Objects to Organize Your Code – Rebecca Murphey
• Javascript: The Good Parts (Chapter 5) (book) -Douglas Crockford
• Prototypal Inheritance in Javascript -Douglas Crockford
• JavaScript Patterns (new) -Stoyan Stefanov

Jquery Mobile

There is another really cool thing that happened at the Boston Conference. The jQuery team released a preview (alpha release) of there mobile framework.

One thing is sure, if you think jQuery is full of magic, well you will see unicorns flying in this one. This framework is an odd beast. You control it, mostly by HTML. Meaning that if you create a simple app, like a mobile version of a blog, you will probably not write one line of jQuery or CSS. A typical example that would be instantly ajaxified and cssified by the framework:

This is a really closed way of doing things, at least if you compare it to Sencha Touch or jQtouch. One thing that have come up for example, when you create a select form element, it replaces it with a jQueryfied html version, and they forgot to add a changed event on it.

I think the jQuery mobile framework will be full of surprise like this. Really easy to use, but probably a bit hard to get really custom applications.

That being said, jQuery mobile is the only framework that aim to support a freaking lot of mobile browsers. Sencha and jQtouch are currently only supporting webkit mobile. The more the framework control all your code the less, you the developer, will break your mobile website on less capable phones, like the Blackberry, which is, a pretty big market in the corporate world.

That’s it!

Bonus

A video that I found really inspirational on javascript module management.

Apple changes the TOS and chooses a wording that basically says that you can’t use an API not written in OBJECTIVE-C for creating Apple apps.

“3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”

This means that the cool kids like Phonegap, Appcelerator, unity3d and Flash CS5 are in trouble. These guys made easy the iPhone developement and enabled you to make cross-platform applications with Android pretty easy. Now this may not seen much, but beside the fact that those companies invested enormous money in making an iPhone compliant framework, a good bunch of companies invested resources in learning those API. That is a big bunch of pissed off peoples.

Granted the wording was in fact chosen to destroy Adobe plans to release a Flash SDK that would enable their developers community to create iPhone compliant applications. Why? Most people agree this is because cross-compliant applications have less quality in it but the real reason seems to be that Apple doesn’t want anyone to create an abstraction language from OBJECTIVE-C. It might be true that framework built on top of objective-C can, sometimes, diminish the apps quality, but I think it is really close minded to think that in the long run this will help them.

It cost a lot more to create a platform specific application, meaning 2 things. One, application will be more expensive to buy, good option? Not really. Two, Less budget for the iPhone specific application, meaning a more rushed application. Not really better. So what is the plan behind the masterminds at Apple? The same it’s always been, control everything in the platform. Why do you think they do not want to add the HTML5 video OGG format in webkit? This is because they want everyone to use h264 like they want every application to be written directly in OBJECTIVE-C, plain simple.

The two sides

http://theflashblog.com/?p=1888 (Pissed off Adobe developer)
http://oppugn.us/posts/1270855147.html (A C coder having fun)

Appcelerator updated statement

Source from ThinkVitamin.

Another nice project, cssSandpaper is a js animation framework making the use of CSS3 transform easy.

Check it out, those two are well worth the read.

Here how it works:

In your field add:

In your language js file have something like (nname is the function name to call):

Now the custom function that could be anywhere in your JS

Grab it here.

But when you start doing web applications, you start to feel the load you impose to your browser at every page. This is where optimizing your javascript becomes crucial.

Webfaction is a great semi-managed VPS hosting. You get half the ram you would get with an unmanaged VPS but installing an application is as easy as using wordpress. For example, you can deploy a Django application in about 5 minutes.

Things might be unstable for a couple of days.

For now it is confirmed that IE9 will support addEventListener (lol) and border-radius, it score 55 on the Acid3 test. It was also said that IE9 will be GPU powered, from what I can gather, this is only true with SVG.

Canvas seems to be out of the question, every drawing demo are done with SVG.

Update: the complete change list http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/info/releasenotes/

I need YOU for 2 minutes,

Some of you guys might not know that it is impossible to have a fixed toolbar in mobile webkit, this is because we can’t fix anything to the gridview webkit produce.

This is something we need if one day we really want to be a contender to replace native applications.

If you have 2 minute sign the petition by going to http://www.abettermobileweb.com and click on the big button at the bottom.