JavaScript everywhere! JavaScript on the client, JavaScript for the database, and JavaScript on the server. Thanks to all the speakers who participated in Wakanday. Keep an eye on this page for links to the presentation slides, as well as videos as they become available.

Keynotes | Breakout Sessions

General Keynotes

Al HilwaOverview of the Development Platforms Market
by Al Hilwa

Where is application development going in the next few years? How will client-side and server-side application platforms evolve? Where does JavaScript fit into the major programming language ecosystems?

We are living in a world of rapid technological transformations that are affecting programming models both on the client and the server. This talk will explore how we got to where we are today and discuss the changes we are about to face with the mainstreaming of mobile and cloud technologies as well as programming models.

Video


Philippe le HégaretHTML 5 for Business Applications
by Philippe le Hégaret

 

Video

Slides (HTML5)

 

 


Douglas CrockfordJavaScript: The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language
by Douglas Crockford

JavaScript has unexpectedly become one of the most important programming languages of the 21st century. Douglas’s talk will outline where JavaScript came from, what it is doing here, and how to use it well.

 

Video

Slides (PDF)


Christoph DornCommonJS Everywhere
by Christoph Dorn

CommonJS is a community-driven effort by volunteers with diverse backgrounds and interests to converge on a minimal common ground that is sound and scalable. The goal is to make writing portable JavaScript applications that run on servers, browsers, desktop applications, and secure sandboxes not only possible, but also accessible to developers and development tools without vendor lock-in or steep learning curves.

Christoph will attempt to paint us a picture of where CommonJS is today and where it is headed. CommonJS is well on its way to realizing the dream of portable JavaScript applications composed of libraries from all over the Internet. That is, modular JavaScript that runs everywhere.

Video


Dave Terry and Dan WassermanJavaScript Everywhere with Wakanda
by Dave Terry and Dan Wasserman

Experts Dave Terry and Dan Wasserman will present Wakanda, an open-source development platform using JavaScript at every level. You will discover the power of Wakanda and how you can use it to build sophisticated business web applications for desktops, mobile devices, and tablets. Learn all about the different editors that make Wakanda unique in the JavaScript world.

Video

 


Joe McCannEnd-to-End JavaScript
by Joe McCann

The programming language that was once only associated with “script kiddies” and annoying popups on websites is now a first-class citizen amongst other languages. JavaScript is no longer simply used for DOM scripting or even Ajax-ified web applications, like Google Maps, but it is being used in far more innovative and productive ways.

Joe’s presentation will walk us through the current state of JavaScript programming and the various endpoints for the language: From the standard desktop web client (the web browser) to the server, mobile applications, desktop applications, and beyond.  His talk will showcase the true capabilities of the language as an end-to-end solution for business and personal usage.

Video

Slides (Google Docs)


Breakout Sessions

Julian AubourgFrom “Callback Soups” to Deferreds!
by Julian Aubourg

Ever thought your code started to look like Christopher Nolan’s Inception? Do you have a hard time following the logic of your own code with callbacks within callbacks within callbacks? Does it become increasingly difficult to maintain and refactor your code because everything is so insanely coupled?

Deferred Objects are amongst those tools you cannot live without in modern JavaScript development, client-side or server-side alike. The trick is to actually start using them.

In this talk, you’ll learn what Deferreds actually are and how to leverage the possibilities they bring client-side (jQuery) and server-side (Node.JS).

Video


Oleg PodsechinThe Future of Server-Side JavaScript
by Oleg Podsechin

Node.js has captured the attention of early adopters by clearly differentiating itself as being asynchronous from the ground up. Now that server-side JavaScript is at the cutting edge of the asynchronous, real-time web, it is in a much better position to establish itself as the go-to language for synchronous CRUD webapps and gain a stronger foothold on the server.

Oleg’s talk will cover the current state of server-side JavaScript beyond Node by mapping out the key standards and technologies as well as their respective positions in the stack. He will introduce Common Node, a synchronous CommonJS compatibility layer using node-fibers, which bridges the gap between the different platforms. He will give us a tour of Common Node’s internals, compare its performance to that of other implementations, such as RingoJS, and go through some ideal use cases.

A case will be made for a cross-platform, synchronous, Rails-like framework. In conclusion, he will identify new areas where server-side JavaScript can really shine, including API mashups, collaborative development and crowdsourced functionality.

Slides (Slideshare)
Video


Jesse StrebDeploying Native Apps Built on JavaScript
by Jesse Streb

As we all know, HTML5 is blurring the distinction between native apps and web apps. Aiding this evolution is an explosion of frameworks and toolsets to help to build these cross-platform, next generation applications. In this presentation, Jesse will describe the current landscape of both UI frameworks: Sencha Touch, jQuery Mobile, jQTouch, jo, zepto, and native containers PhoneGap, Appcelerator, and Brightcove App Cloud.

Jesse’s presentation will then dive deep into building a very minimal app on top of both PhoneGap and Brightcove App Cloud.

Slides (PDF) | Demo (Github)

Video


Alistair MacDonaldWeb Audio
by Alistair MacDonald

The W3C Audio Working Group has been working with Mozilla, Google, and the global web developer community to enhance the audio feature of web browsers. Mozilla and Google have developed experimental JavaScript APIs that provide many much-needed features for sound and music in 3D games and digital synthesis in co-creation music platforms. Take a look at the this YouTube video for more information.

This talk will cover:

  • How the work on Web Audio began
  • Jaw-dropping JavaScript demos using these experimental audio APIs
  • Device connectivity and VOIP
  • The future of Web Audio as well as the standardization work at the W3C

 
Video


Glen LipkaUser Experience: Consistency When Using Frameworks
by Glen Lipka

Programmers often create an application’s user experience (UX) without involving designers. Learn how to optimize the UX by doing less work and by using client-side frameworks. Learn when to introduce new patterns and when to stick with existing ones.

Design is all about decisions. Programmers make decisions every day that will affect their product’s success. Even without being a designer, you can create a great user experience.

Slides (Slideshare)
Video


Hannes WallnöferNew Paths for Concurrent JavaScript
by Hannes Wallnöfer

Node.js has brought the JavaScript event loop from the browser to the server by pairing it with a strictly non-blocking paradigm. This model has proven to work well for I/O-centric server applications. If JavaScript is to become a true general-purpose programming language, there will be a need for alternative models of concurrency.

In this session, Hannes  proposes an alternative concurrency model for JavaScript that is based on the Actor model. Starting with W3C Web Workers, he will demonstrate how to build a system that has the benefits of threading, such as true preemptive scheduling without the pitfalls of shared data locking.

Hannes will focus on features aimed towards highly concurrent, CPU-heavy, server-side applications, including selective data sharing, concurrent lock-free data structures, functional programming, and read-only data.

Slides (PDF)

Video


Henri BergiusNoFlo – Managing Workflows with JavaScript
by Henri Bergius

NoFlo is a JavaScript implementation of flow-based programming (FBP), a way of separating the control flow of software from the actual software logic. It helps you to organize large applications, especially when importing and modifying large data sets.

FBP itself is not a new idea: it comes from a term IBM used in the 70s to define the concepts of more manageable business workflows. NoFlo, however, refreshes these concepts and brings them to Node.js applications.

The MIT-licensed NoFlo library can either be used to run full flow-based applications or as a library for making complex workflows or asynchronous processes more manageable.

This session will introduce FBP to the audience, and show how NoFlo can be used for large-scale data processing. It will also demonstrate the lighter side of NoFlo: how you can use it to simplify user interactions.

Slides (Slideshare)

Video


Andrews & FisherSSJS in the Cloud
by Scott Andrews & Mark Fisher

Cloud Foundry is the first open platform as a service (PaaS) project supporting multiple frameworks, multiple cloud providers, and multiple application services all on a cloud scale platform. Cloud Foundry allows developers to focus on writing applications instead of worrying about infrastructure or needing to configure application and database servers.

This talk will focus on Cloud Foundry’s rich ecosystem of application frameworks (including Node.js), data services and cloud providers, showing the ease of deploying apps, consuming services in the cloud and moving your application between different clouds.

You can sign up for a free account at cloudfoundry.com, and join the open source community at cloudfoundry.org.

Video


Matt HicksJavaScript in the Front, Cloud in the Back
by Matt Hicks

This session ain’t about your brother-in-law’s mullet. It’s about leveraging the Cloud for web application deployments. Those of us developing (purely) JavaScript applications still have to deploy our applications somewhere. Your Ajax calls or JavaScript APIs might be using Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, or Perl on the backend to handle CRUD, perform some business logic, check authentication, etc. There are plenty of Clouds and Platform-as-a-Service offerings to choose from, but where do you start?

Join us for an action-packed session where Matt will show you how to deploy a JavaScript application on OpenShift with the backend in a framework of your choice: EE6, CDI, Seam, Sprint, Zend, Cake, Rails, Sinatra, PerlDancer, Django, and the list goes on. All this without having to retrofit your app to get it to work the way the cloud provider thinks your app should work.

Video


Alexandre MorgautBenefits of an Open Environment with Wakanda
by Alexandre Morgaut

Wakanda may provide an all-in-one solution, but it’s far from being a monolithic platform! Sure, you get a development studio, an Ajax framework, an HTTP Server, an application engine, and a database, but it can very easily interact with your existing tools, frameworks, and libraries. Learn how, as a developer, you’ll be able to share your own widgets, modules, services, and plugins between your applications and externally with any compatible development community. Find out about the power of system workers and Wakanda’s datastore HTTP API to bring your own JavaScript tools to Wakanda Studio.

Video

Slides (Slideshare)


John HannAMD vs CommonJS. Which is Better?
by John Hann

We all know that modules are in our future. ECMAScript. Next modules (aka “Harmony” modules) will start appearing in browsers in early 2012. Too bad Harmony modules won’t be universal 2021 when IE9 will finally be dead.

No need to wait! AMD and CommonJS Modules/1.1 are fully supported in a wide variety of environments already. But why are there two standards? Which one should I pick?

We’ll take a quick look at each of the formats, compare and contrast their features, discuss the benefits of using modules now, and finally draw some conclusions.

Slides (HTML5)

Video

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