Javascript Libraries
The talk was originaly designed as a introduction to the Roo Javascript library, Having seen the crowds at Barcamp, I thought there would be a dozen 'Javascript' talks, so I decided to concentrate more on the generic details on how the libraries differ, and what their purpose was.. In retrospect, this was pretty much the only talk on Javascript (in English). The only other one being about using webkit as a mobile cross platform tool.
What's out there
How the different Libraries have evolved to solve different problem domains. Either a strong focus on generic web sites, with effects, or the more intranet style desktop. From the audience, it looked like most people had heard of JQuery, a few for prototype, and none for YIU - which was a typo ;)
Messy code for large frameworks
A look at some example code for each of the libraries.. (also where my laptop totally failed.., trying to get the networking enabled after the window manager had crashed proved to be the end of it.) - Thanks to Bo and others for providing a spare Ubuntu box to present on.
What this slide is trying to point out, is that while JQuery and Prototype's abreviated methods are a reasonable solution to the web problem, of low bandwidth, quickly adding special effects and designed to be delivered in with the HTML. The intranet desktop problem requires a different set of code constraints, that result in code that has to be more verbose. This is due to the necessity of long term maintenance, rather than a fire and forget delivery on a web page. Hence JQuery/Prototype are poorly suited to Rich Client applications.
ExtJS to Roo Fork (with typo)
Quite a simple slide explaining how the Roo JS Library came about. A result of the licence changes in ExtJS, that made it effectively impossible to use as a Library.
Also mentioned was why the GPL is a poor choice for libraries, both from choosing a library, and releasing one. Very few project have full GPL licenced libraries, as they are extremely viral.
Roo Concepts
A rather pointless slide, however it does point out the ideas around Roo (some of which where inherited from ExtJS, and others, which have been added since the fork.
Hello World
A snippet of the hello world example from the documentationStandard JSON / Rest request response API
A short discussion of how data travels between backend and the front end, using a simple, fixed standard.
