Front Trends 2010 Conference – review

Front-Trends 2010

source: front-trends.com

On the 21-22.10 2010 in Warsaw Front-Trends 2010 conference took place, in which I had the pleasure to participate. The conference took place for the very first time. It brought together lead the world-class professionals. During this two-day meeting there were so many interesting presentations describing new solutions, showing the good practices and more. Front Trends was not just a conference, it was also a party (and after-party), professional discussion panel, competitions with prizes, and more.

Introduction

Organizators

The Conference was organized by Piotr Zwoliński 1 (founder of Frontend Force ) and hosted by Paweł Czerski and Damian Wielgosik 2. The main goal was to inspire creativity and explore the evolving trends of the front-end landscape. For this reason there were 18 distinguished speakers at two stages, who covered topics on HTML(5), CSS(3), and of course JavaScript. In addition to speakers, conference attracted about 300 people from web-industry.

Preparation

The ticket for the event included attendance at speeches, refreshment breaks and lunch on Thursday and Friday, some beer coupons or vodka on Huśtawka Club. But didn’t include the Wi-Fi Internet connection ;-). For some opinion it wasn’t so bad – at least not everybody was twitting, some was really listening to the speakers. Generally, everything was prepared very well, but…

Yes, there is always some “but” and so was there. The opening speeches, for my opinion were too long and too much detailed. There was a lot of talk describing “How dreams come true…“, which could be found on the abut site – so most of the attenders could and read before. I understand that it was their first conference they organized, so everything should be forgiven and forgotten. For the future: it should be shorter, more funny, more specific. There were some competition with Złap Taxi, and their speech was even worse. Some people were very disappointed and gave them thumbs down 3 .

Schedule 4

Because of so many great speakers, the conference was divided into two auditoriums. For me, very interested almost in every speech it wasn’t stunning idea. Because of this I was forced to choose between some presentations and couldn’t see them all. The whole schedule can be found on Front-Tredns site 4 . After first review of the list I’ve picked:

Day 1

From two presentation running at the same time:

  1. You know webOS – by Markus Leutwyler
  2. JavaScript & HTML5 – Brave New World – by Robert Nyman
  3. JS Performances VS Common Good Practices – by Andrea Giammarchi
  4. JavaScript: The Rise of the Middle-End – by Kyle Simpson

Single presentation at a time:

  1. Keynote – by Douglas Crockford
  2. Panel discussion – by Douglas Crockford, Tantek Çelik, Peter-Paul Koch

Day 2

From two presentation running at the same time:

  1. Testing JavaScript – by Morgan Roderick
  2. Test-first JavaScript – by Christian Johansen
  3. Cross-device applications development – by Kamil Trebunia
  4. Library for 2D-mechanism – by Stefan Gössner

Single presentation at a time:

  1. Keynote: JSON over SMS – by Peter-Paul Koch

Presentations – Day 1: Thursday, 21 Oct 2010

First day of the conference started with registration (from 8 am), then delayed opening speeches took place. After that from 9:15 the presentations began.


You know webOS – by Markus Leutwyler

Photo by michalbe

You know webOS – by Markus Leutwyler

Markus Leutwyler presented webOs 5 he is working on. In short steps he presented history, what webOS is and how to develop web applications for it. As he described, for now there are only a few devices with this OS but more of them are coming this or next year (a tablet and even a printer). The next step of his speech was about webOs apps development, which frameworks can be used, how to test them, packing and more.


JavaScript-HTML5-Brave-New-World-by-Robert-Nyman

Photo by Krzychu Danek

JavaScript & HTML5 – Brave New World – by Robert Nyman

Robert gave us a talk about HTML5, its features and future. He covered some basic of Javascript, then stepped to main topic of this speech – features of HTML5. His examples was interesting, there were place for properties of the video object, HTML5 File API, web storage. The presentation was well-prepared, with humorous addons (Forrest Gump and Friends references). Robert is a Bruce Willis of the HTML5. His speech is already available at slideshare.net 6


JS Performances VS Common Good Practices – by Andrea Giammarchi

Photo by Krzychu Danek

JS Performances VS Common Good Practices – by Andrea Giammarchi

His speech was about Javascript performance. He showed us performance tests of some different approaches to the same problem. As I think, this is very good, that there are people like Andrea, who measures, benchmarks the code. Because of that we know, that using null comparison is sometimes 515% faster than using undefined. Andrea has already posted his talk summary on his blog – WebReflection 7 . You can find there his slides, benchmark and examples.


JavaScript: The Rise of the Middle-End – by Kyle Simpson

Photo by Krzychu Danek

JavaScript: The Rise of the Middle-End – by Kyle Simpson

Kyle Simpson topic was kind of innovative. He presented his point of view for using JavaScript as a client- and server-side language to improve web performance and code maintainability. His middle-end was presented in a very clear way, using graphs, charts. After the theoretical part he showed us the idea in working example of Shortie.me


Keynote – by Douglas Crockford

Photo by oskar

Keynote – by Douglas Crockford

For those who are interesting in advanced, proper JavaScript, Douglas Crockford is well Known. His speech was explaining that tools like node.js and browser event loop based model can make our applications better. The way Douglas is presenting his point of view is always welcome to hear, full of anecdotes, side stories and intelligent retorts. He has presented big part of programming languages history, the way it developed and the effects of this development on JavaScript this days. His similar speech (from Loopage) can be found on yahoo developer network 8


Panel discussion – by Douglas Crockford, Tantek Çelik, Peter-Paul Koch

Photo by Krzychu Danek

Panel discussion – by Douglas Crockford, Tantek Çelik, Peter-Paul Koch

Douglas Crockford, Tantek Çelik, Peter-Paul Koch gave us impressive show. It was more than one and a half hour of very interesting discussion. Firstly Zbigniew Braniecki was asking previously prepared question, then the discussion moved rather to free-talk, and after the question list was empty the audience has chance to ask their questions. It’s impossible to present what was the whole talk abut, so I will not. You should be there.

Presentations – Day 2: Friday, 22nd October 2010

Second day of the conference started at 9 am. For some people that was to early (keep in mind evening meeting on Huśtawka Pub). Second day of Front Trends was opened by Jake Archibald in auditorium 1 and Morgan Roderick in auditorium 2.


Testing JavaScript – by Morgan Roderick

Testing JavaScript – by Morgan Roderick

Morgan Roderick has shown the basic of making tests while coding in JavaScript. At the beginning he showed us historic examples of big fails which was the point to start talk abut importance of writing tests. Then we could see a bunch of JavaScript test frameworks. On the next step, we saw real code examples how do the tests look like, how should be build, some tricks. His presentation is already available at slideshare.net 9


Test-first JavaScript – by Christian Johansen

Photo by Krzychu Danek

Test-first JavaScript – by Christian Johansen

Christian Johansen was presenting his idea of tests in JavaScript. He is the author of Test-Driven JavaScript Development book which was the point of his speech. BTW big thanks for the copy of this book!. At the beginning his talk was about some basic info in testing code, unit test etc. Then he showed us a lot of live-coding. That was very impressive. Writing tests, code, testing, making mistakes and catching them because of TDD approach. It was convincing and instructive.


Cross-device applications development – by Kamil Trebunia

Photo by michalbe

Cross-device applications development – by Kamil Trebunia

This two-part speech was interesting and detailed. Kamil started with advantages of cross-device apps development. Then showed a lot of tools can be used (Phonegap, Titanium). Then he presented JavaScript frameworks dedicated for mobile design (jQuery mobile, Sencha Touch). The last part of his presentation was about optimization for mobiles. He has inspired me to start developing for mobile, especially after face-to-face talk some time later.


Library for 2D-mechanism – by Stefan Gössner

Photo by michalbe

Library for 2D-mechanism – by Stefan Gössner

This speech was provided by Stefan Gössner who is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Dormund University of Applied Seinces and Arts. As he said, he needed an 2D mechanism for his e-learning application. So he checked available solutions (they were presented during the speech), then, as he noticed that all of them aren’t reliable, decided to wrote one. He presented the whole process of doing such library, starting from defining requirements, cases of use, through math, calculations, learning best practices of JavaScript language (from Douglas C. book), finishing with performance tests. This is what I call real engineering! As he has shown in examples, the library (based on JSON and Canvas) id dealing with mechanical simulations very well. The animations (as required at beginning) was very smooth and realistic. He promised that when he will finish it, it would be released as an open-source library.


Keynote: JSON over SMS – by Peter-Paul Koch

Photo by Krzychu Danek

Keynote: JSON over SMS – by Peter-Paul Koch

The last speech of the second day was given by Peter-Paul Koch (known as PPK). His talk was an open mind predictions. The topic title was “JSON over SMS” but it wasn’t all about. He started his speech with a story about a fisherman in 2018 (the year, when the iPhone 3G would probably cost only about $10), who thanks to mobile apps will be able to keep track of fish prices in various towns. Then described what HTML5 apps would be like. The talk was very interesting, the thoughts unpredictable. He was talking about free HTML5 apps with paid content, shared via Bluetooth on every mobile device. Because of new smart-phones available on the market, with new features he was predicting new JavaScript mobile browser’s events (onphonecall, oncompasspointnorth, ononline, onoffline, etc). Very good presentation, just in time for final speech. Slides already posted on his blog. 10

Final thought

I’m really glad I could participate in this event. Thank You all I was talking with. Big thanks for organizers, it’s really great that such a fantastic conference took place in Poland. I hope that FalsyValues will be even better.

Źródła

  1. http://frontendforce.com/ []
  2. http://ferrante.pl []
  3. http://michalbe.blogspot.com/2010/10/front-trends-2010-in-few-words.html []
  4. http://2010.front-trends.com/schedule [] []
  5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS []
  6. http://www.slideshare.net/robnyman/javascript-and-html5 []
  7. http://webreflection.blogspot.com/2010/10/front-trends-2010-my-talk.html []
  8. http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockford-loopage []
  9. http://www.slideshare.net/MorganRoderick/testing-javascriptfronttrends2010 []
  10. http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/10/fronttrends_sli.html []
 

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