Kevin Hoyt

I had the honor and privilege to attend and present at jQuery Conference 2008 the weekend before The Ajax Experience in Boston. I wasn’t sure what to expect going in, but found the event well attended. The sessions were broken into two tracks, beginner and advanced, filled with authorities on jQuery. I took my little audio recorder with me to the event, and walked away with three sessions to share.

Learning jQuery (audio)

In this session, Karl Swedberg, author of the well-known “Learning jQuery” book gets you started with jQuery. Karl had a number of projector problems up front, so this session isn’t as long as the other two. As you would expect, this session is a very gentle introduction to using jQuery. Karl started off with his own slides, and then moved into using some available from John Resig. I really felt like Karl hit his stride about the last fifteen minutes, but unfortunately ran out of time. This is one of those sessions I wish had gone on for another hour.

Introduction to jQuery UI (audio)

If you follow jQuery, you’ll know that there has been working on a user interface suite of components called jQuery UI. The UI project is still very much in its infancy, and has lots of room to grow, but in this session Richard Worth gives a good introduction to where the team is so far. The occasional one-off comment about why the project is architected one way versus another was probably the most valuable part for me. Dreamweaver CS4 supports OpenAjax Metadata Specification Widget Metadata, and you can expect to see a number of the jQuery UI components available as extensions (and more from other frameworks).

Building Your First Plug-In (audio)

My favorite feature of jQuery is that it is very unobtrusive to my workflow. If find that the minimalist approach works very well for me when building Adobe AIR applications. My second favorite feature then is the plug-in architecture, which has created a vibrant community. If you’re looking for some feature for your application, chances are that a plug-in already exists. Probably the most thorough session I attended during the conference, Mike Alsup walks you through all the details of making your own plug-ins for jQuery.

There was much to like about the conference. I like the location (Boston), the timing (just before The Ajax Experience), the content (jQuery), the community, the meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner), the venue (MIT STATA), and more. One area that I thought the conference might improve is to have an intermediate track. There were a few cases where the beginner was too beginner, and the advanced too advanced. It would have been great to find a middle ground for sessions as well. Other than that, I look forward to attending next year.

In the meantime, you can download the jQuery/AIR example I put together for the conference. The application is an early version of a desktop application I’ve been working on to monitor a specific set of RSS feeds - those from my reports. It includes all the assets necessary to roll the web-based version of the application (using PHP on the server) to a desktop application using Adobe AIR. The bits in the archive are in that final state and includes custom chrome, local file IO, system notifications and network detection - all using jQuery and AIR. Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.