JavaScript addicts

Now it’s almost a week ago, and I still haven’t written the more in depth article about the BarCamp Munich 2008, here it comes. As I have already said, the organization was great, first and foremost the people behind it, thanks a lot. But also Sun who provided the location and last but not least all participants. I will be there next year again, I am sure!

Arrival
When I arrived there about 10:00 everybody started gathering in the cantine, I just had the time to grab a coffee and find Johannes to have at least someone I know :-). Then the introduction round started and everybody stood up said his/her name and tagged himself with three tags. It went much faster than you would expect. About 15 minutes I would say, for about 300 people. Impressive, especially the ping pong strategy was somehow cool, going from one end of the room to the other, which was possible with two microphones. I realized, when it was my turn (and I was almost the last one) nobody had yet used the tag “ajax”, so I stood up and said “I am Wolfram Kriesing form uxebu, and my tags are: ajax, javascript and dojo”. Ok, I had passed the first test.

dtrace
While all first time barcamper went to see a short session about how to barcamp Johannes showed me pretty impressive stuff you can do with dtrace. Just off of the top of his head he wrote a tiny script which just showed all “open” system calls, then we double clicked one of my files on the desktop and a hell lot of open calls were triggered, wow so much work for just looking at one file.
If you want to get the hands deep into the gears of your system for whatever reason dtrace is waiting to be used. I will definitely need to dive into it for a project we are developing at uxebu. Unfortunately it is only available on Solaris and Mac OS X. But hey, most web devs are working on Macs, and since that is a dev tool it could be pretty useful to many.

First two sessions
After introducing my two talks I went to see the session about the web in China, it was nice and interesting information, but of too little use for me. Right after this, first session we all had lunch. Then I went to “presentations with storyboard”, where Alexandra Graßler told us about how to do presentations best using a storyboard (some more info here). It was very good I think, not too much new stuff but good the storyboard part was the good thing. Building a logical tree for your presentation on which you “crawl” along with your arguments in order to lead the listener to the assumptions you are going to make. I just need to pick the cherries from it try and practice that.

My first session, Efficient JavaScript development
After that I had my two sessions, I guess two of the more technical sessions, which actually surprised me, but the number of listeners convinced me that there are interested techies there. Fortunately.
For the first session “Efficient JavaScript development” I got some interesting input regarding the direction of the talk. Matthias Gutjahr expected a bit more about how to write efficient JavaScript code. Right, the title might be a bit misleading. So I am trying to fix the direction of the talk, but I like the name and the wide range of possibilities it allows you to talk about. May be it pulls more people, then I only have to take care of meeting the expectations. I will try very hard! And since it was actually a subset and a test of what I want to talk about at the Ajax in Action 2008 in two weeks, it was a great first try. Thank you all for listening, the good questions and the input!

My second talk, dojo toolkit
The next session “dojo toolkit” right after the first one, was targetted purely on dojo. I had converted the slides just one hour before to be real uxebu slides - but hey, what has to be has to be! The always again upcoming questions were about cometd, cross domain handling and some dojo internals.
So I searched some URLs to show some of the examples that I may talked about or that target the mentioned topics.
One is babel chat, which Pete Higgins created and showed off a couple of times at the Ajax Experience in Boston. It’s a pretty neat application for showing off what cometd and dojo.data can do. You set your preferred language, log in and you can chat in your language, the answers come in your preferred language translated by google translate. We had a lot of fun with it, since the translations are often very funny. You know, the automatic translation stuff mostly sucks. But the show case is worth it with some extra fun included.
Another thing that Pete had also created in Boston was the faces demo “Create you own dojo javascript developer“. You can flip parts of the faces and choose from various developers. You will get a lot to laugh! There is even a hall of shame now, check it out! It uses dojox.fx.flip from Nicola Rizzo. Which allows you to flip layers and the cool thing about it is all done just by manipulating CSS properties.

This has already become a lot of text and because I am actually not a big friend of so much text I just stop it here and continue in a second article. (Or am I just too lazy right now :-)).

All pics form zerok, thanks!