You website will suck without a fluid, usable UI. Your UI will suck without a rich, maintainable interface. Your programmers will suck if you don’t give them the tools they need to build the UI you need.
JavaScript has gotten a bad rap. The browser has become a first class application environment, and JavaScript is the leading platform within the browser for rich applications. Sprinkled throughout the web, there is a ton of unmaintainable, unreadable, buggy legacy JavaScript code, acting as very bad examples of client side programming. Many times, a software engineer’s first introduction to JavaScript involves this ugly code. As JavaScript guru Douglas Crockford says, “Most of the people writing in JavaScript are not programmers”, and this misrepresents the JavaScript language. So, sometimes backend programmers disregard JavaScript because of its inaccurate portrayal by script kiddies. Then the UI languishes, or is written by programmers that just want to find a quick way to make a library do what they want and move on.
Client programming deserves just as much attention as backend programming.
jQuery is a tool created by good software engineers that applies modern and correct software paradigms to the DOM-JavaScript relationship. It can help you produce an elegant, functional, maintainable UI — and most importantly give your users an excellent experience with much less effort than other JavaScript libraries.
In this presentation, we will explore the web and the role that JavaScript has played it in. We’ll talk about how JavaScript was used in the early days of the internet, and how it is being used now. Web 2.0 applications with rich user interfaces must think of their Client Tier (the browser) as a first-class application environment itself in order to give UI developers the resources they need to rock their UIs and keep their users involved and active within the communities they want to create.
Today’s AJAX environment is a new playing field for JavaScript, and jQuery is playing a major role on the field. It provides a JavaScript toolbox that is unobtrusive, functional, and pragmatic above all else. jQuery just gets things done in a way no other library today can do.
After an introduction to the environment for jQuery, I will be talking about the features of the library and giving code examples of jQuery tools being used at some of the best-designed sites and frameworks on the web today: Netflix, Google, Digg, Dell, Wordpress, Drupal, CBS, NBC, Technorati, etc.
I hope to see you at the conference, but you had better register soon. I hear it is going to sell out.
