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source: falsyvalues.com

Falsy Values === A True JavaScript Event

(18-20 May, 2011, Warsaw, Poland). Again Paweł Czerski and Damian Wielgosik (organizers of the Front Trends 2010 Conference) prepared high-level front-end conference. As before on FT, with names that requires no introduction: Zbigniew Braniecki, Douglas Crockford, Tantek Çelik, Tom Hughes-Croucher, Andrea Giammarchi, Christian Johansen, Michał Budzyński and more.

This time, the event was not only a conference (1 day) but also (or mostly – 2 days) – a workshops. On the first two days participants could feel live coding on seven different workshops ¹. Beginning from “Introduction to JavaScript”, “HTML5/CSS3” through “Game Development”, “node.js”, “Desktop applications with Javascript” ending with “ECMAScript 5” and “TDD/JavaScript testing”.

The conference venue

The third and last day of this event – was the conference day. It took place in Kino Femina – yes the speakers was presenting theirs speeches in a cinema. It was really comfortable for the listeners during the presentations, but not so much at breaks. The cinema hall was a bit too tight for such big group of people.
Fortunately there was only one track of the speeches, we didn’t have to choose between two great presentations, like it was on Front Trends, so all the presentations could be heard.

Conference schedule

1. Douglas Crockford – Styling for success
2. Dmitry Soshnikov – ECMAScript 6
3. Juriy “kangax” Zaytsev – Fabric.js – building a canvas library
4. Tom Hughes-Croucher – node.js
5. Zbigniew Braniecki – Javascript compilation
6. Brian LeRoux – PhoneGap
7. Tantek Çelik – CASSIS

src: falsyvalues.com

Douglas Crockford – Styling for success

Douglas started his speech from showing some psychological research. Told us about Head vs Gut, how and why it works. After this introduction he was talking about readable code, perfection, consistent style, explicitness, avoiding confusion, writing in language you are writing in. He brought some info about JSLint – The JavaScript Code Quality Tool. If your code is written by the gut not head – be careful with this tool – it will hurt your feelings. "There will be bugs"

src: falsyvalues.com

Dmitry Soshnikov – ECMAScript 6

Dmitry was talking about new features planned in ECMAScript 6 (ES6). There was a long list of changes they are preparing for us with Harmony. Highlights to read about: let: block scope, constants (variables and functions), function parameters default values, destructing, object arguments (…rest), short notations, proxy objects, modules system, generators (iterators, coroutines/multi-tasks, array comprehensions. You should see his slides with bunch of code examples on slideshare ²

src: falsyvalues.com

Juriy „kangax” Zaytsev – Fabric.js – building a canvas library

Juriy show as great object-oriented Fabric.js canvas library. It makes it easy to work with HTML5 canvas element. It is also an SVG-to-canvas parser, it’s unit tested, modular, cross-browser and fast.
During the presentation Kangax showed us some basic code, live examples (with very hight FPS) and described base functionality, even show some comparison with other canvas libraries.
You can check the demo and of course look at the source. Site using Fabric to help with t-shirts desing: http://printio.ru.

src: falsyvalues.com

Tom Hughes-Croucher – node.js

In last few months node.js is everywhere, all talks about, most of the attendees was testing it. Tom started his presentation with some theory, client-server model. Then he described event loop idea, multi-tasking and non-blocking architecture. After such introduction he showed us some on-his-knees live coding. There were easiest examples of server listener, then some more complicated ending with real live-chat application. He even run his own wi-fi based node server listing for connections from audience.

src: falsyvalues.com

Zbigniew Braniecki – Javascript compilation

Gandalf started his presentation from little query: ask if we want speech about i18n in JavaScript or about (almost unknown) browsers javascript code compilations. He was so suggestive that the majority wanted the second option. It was very interesting to look at the other side of JavaScript – the browser side, ways of speeding up code execution, how the benchmarks can work. Next Zbigniew was talking about JIT method and tracing compilations the differences between them, difficulties with implementing tracing JIT. At the end he encouraged to write our code the way it would be easier for compiler to deal with it – and after all to run in faster. His presentation is available on slideshare ³ .

src: falsyvalues.com

Brian LeRoux – PhoneGap

If you are mobile developer you most likely know PhoneGap ⁴ . If don’t – you should, because this is the only Open Source mobile framework that supports 6 platforms with other on horizon. His presentation was not only about PhoneGap, mostly because almost everyone there was familiar with it, but also about new tool Cordova ⁵ . It automates common tasks for building cross platform mobile projects, such as: compiling, debugging, testing, releasing and other things in between. The presentation was funny, full-of live examples (even with geolocation and gyroscope). He showed how easy is to write an javascript application and then with some basic command deploy it on different mobile platform like iOS or Android.

src: falsyvalues.com

Tantek Çelik – CASSIS

The last presentation on this conference and as I think the most controversial. Radek Benkel even wrote one full note about it ⁶ (in addition to the typical relation from whole conference).
So what it was about? Tantek presented his new project: CASSIS ⁷ . The main concept of CASSIS is to write one code for both client-side (JavaScript) and server-side (PHP). For example if you have form validation you probably do it twice and write the same code for server- and client-side. With CASSIS you can write the code once for both of them. How it works? With complicated comment system, Tantek checked what comment style is recognized by which interpreter and with this knowledge he was able to write one code in one file that can be recognized only by PHP interpreter, or only JavaScript interpreter or both. Of course it’s not only comments, it is also variable names (starting with $ sign) and some other tricks.
There is a lot of questions coming with such project. Of course it has its limitations, the projects wasn’t dedicated for all possible uses but it is very interesting, different approach to the problem of doubled code.

Final thought

It is always positive to visit such meetings, meet people, see new ideas, projects. I’m really glad I could participate in this event. Thanks to Damian and Paweł for organizing this conference in Poland. You showed the world that in our country there are great events to, that we have talented people and JavaScript has strong representation in here.

Źródła

1. http://falsyvalues.com/schedule.html [↩]
2. http://www.slideshare.net/dmitrysoshnikov/falsyvalues-dmitry-soshnikov-ecmascript-6 [↩]
3. http://www.slideshare.net/zbraniecki/js-compilation-falsy-values-slides [↩]
4. http://www.phonegap.com/ [↩]
5. https://github.com/brianleroux/Cordova [↩]
6. http://blog.rbenkel.me/2011/05/cassis-jeden-aby-wszystkimi-rzadzic/ [↩]
7. http://cassisproject.com/ [↩]