Inspiration from the Fronteers 2009 conference

 

Back from the Fronteers 2009 conference in Amsterdam, I have decided to share my notes and thoughts on the conference. I usually write down whenever I hear an interesting topic, tool, technique etc. at a conference. This time I have decided to write a small BLOG post about is.

The conference itself was something new for me, usually the conferences I attend are very TYPO3 specific, and this was targeted at frontend developers, i.e. CSS, HTML and JavaScript. And the first thing to say about the conference is that the lineup was incredible.  Douglas Crockford (JavaScript guru), John Resig (author of jQuery), Steve sounders (inventor of YSlow), Christian Heilmann (Yahoo maps etc) and many other very, very talented speakers where lined up for the conference.

I can highly recommend the conference to everyone even remotely interested in HTML, CSS and/or JavaScript. And Amsterdam is always a nice city:)

Inspiration

Here is the list of things I found very interesting. I'll try to explain some of them in more details, but if you are just looking for the lo-down og concepts, prorams and URL's I need to check out, here it is

• Yahoo query language
• Aptimize WAX (No it's not a hair product)
• Box model in CSS3:  http://www.the-haystack.com/presentations/fronteers09/
• Sprite ME
• Goggles Page Speed
• Showslow
• ADSafe
• CAVA
• Object capability pattern
• TTf2eot
• Snook.ca
• FontForge
• Batik
• Font squirrel
• Scriptv2.com
• Github

Yahoo query language

Christian Heilmann from Yahoo, gave a very good talk with the intriguing name "Of Hamsters, Feature creatures and missed opportunities". Besides the funny title, and some good points about programmers hamstring code, not wanting to reuse others code, and the tendency to always add more features to your otherwise simple programs, he demonstrated a very cool thing: The Yahoo query language. To make is short, it's a webservice (REST) that allows you to query a long line of other Webservices/APIs (like flickr, RSS feeds and even HTML) through a SQL like syntax. The very cool thing is that you can combine the queries, so you can select Geotags from Amsterdam, then query Flick with you found geotag Ids' and fetch all information about them, all in one simple query to the Yahoo webservice.

The codesample below is stolen from Christians talk which fetches images from Flickr with geotag that contains Amsterdam.

SELECT * from flickr.photos.search where woe_id IN ( SELECT woeid FROM geo.places where text="Amsterdam" )

Extremely cool way to do even very complicated mashups. And if the service you need is not provided, you can even write your own little wrapper that makes it possible to query your source through the YQL.

Take a look at developer.yahoo.com/yql/ here.

Slides from the presentation: http://www.wait-till-i.com/2009/11/05/of-hamsters-feature-creatures-and-missed-opportunities-my-talk-at-fronteers-2009/

Twitter: @codepo08

Even faster websites

Steve Souders is probably most famous for his firebug extension YSlow developed while he was at Yahoo. He is now at Google, but is apparently not involved in the development of the Google YSlow equivalent "Page speed".  Steve is also the author of a very good book: "High performance websites" and the sequel "Even faster websites" (together with Nicole Sullivan).

One of the cool things he presented was a small tool he made: SpriteME which will take your website, detect which background images could benefit from being part of a Sprite, send a request to a webservice to make the sprites, inject the needed CSS in your page, ready for you to inspect.

If you have ever tried spending hours producing the needed sprites for a website, you will realize how cool this little tool is.

Take a look here: http://www.stevesouders.com/

Object oriented CSS

Now this sounds llike a weird title, since I would argue that there is no such thing as Object Oriented CSS. This talk by Nicole Sullivan was really an eye-opener for me. I realized that CSS is a topic where I can really learn a lot, and I need to improve my skills with an order of magnitude.

What Nicole argued was that you can really use a lot of the concepts from OOP when writing CSS, re-using code, encapsulation etc. She gave a brief introduction to the cascade of CSS, and continued with explaining how specificity works in CSS. This is something I, and every other at MOC should know by heart.

One of the key points of her talk (http://slideshare.net/stubbornella/)  were to make proper use of the cascade, don’t style specifically for a single module, never use id (i.e. # in CSS) unless you really, really know that you will ever only need one instance. Lots of cool points in her presentation.

Twitter: @stubbornella

Github

Apparently I'm really behind on this. Without exception all links to code was not SourceForge, SVN, CVS  etc, but instead all links where to GitHub. I need to check this out...

Object capability pattern

Douglas Crockford gave a very good talk about security in JavaScript, and one of his key points was that we need to alter the way objects communicate with each other in order to make JavaScript more secure. He briefly presented the Object Capability Pattern, which looked very cool, also for other OOP programming languages. Look out for this, and for version 5 of the ECMAScript specification due this year.