appendTo Talks at jQuery Conference 2011: Boston

The talk proposal acceptance letters went out for the upcoming jQuery Conference in Boston October 1-2 this weekend. appendTo learned that it will be represented by three talks. Here is a preview of those talks.

Breaking Changes + Happy Users = Mythical Software?

by Scott González
When working on a large project, there inevitably comes a time when you want to make changes to the API that aren’t backward compatible. Unfortunately, we all know how painful it can be to upgrade when you know there are breaking changes.

In this talk, we’ll see how jQuery UI is dealing with this problem as the API is being redesigned for all existing components. We’ll discuss how jQuery UI is implementing the changes and how the upgrade process won’t force users to undergo a massive all-or-nothing upgrade, allowing them to start using new components immediately while easing into the new APIs.

Contextual jQuery in Practice

by Doug Neiner
Building on the principles taught last year in my session titled “Contextual jQuery” (See video), we’ll take off the kid gloves and dive into the techniques you will need to write adaptive, reusable and responsible jQuery.

Techniques that will be covered in this talk include: methods for discovering users actions for just-in-time initialization, understanding delegation and how to use it to write code with minimal setup methods, using deferreds to write code that works the same way regardless of the initialization state and using localStorage to predict user actions over time to provide for a faster user experience. In addition to the initialization strategies, we’ll look at ways to glean data from the current environment to allow your code to be responsive instead of declarative.

Extending Your jQuery Application with AmplifyJS

by Elijah Manor
As your front-end application grows it is important to abstract pieces of your implementation to make it easier to extend and less painful to maintain.

AmplifyJS is a JavaScript library that was developed to assist with a common set of problems in front-end development. The three components consist of a publish and subscribe messaging system, a persistent storage component that abstracts various cross-browser concerns, and a request piece that sets out to make data retrieval more maintainable.

This talk will start with a sample application that is brittle and tightly coupled and we will slowly enhance the application by the three AmplifyJS components. In the end we will have an application that is testable, flexible, and loosely coupled.

Each talk will be 30 minutes long. There are still plenty of tickets left for the event. Go to https://events.jquery.org to learn more about how to attend these great talks and many more. Will you be attending the jQuery Conference? If so, we would love to meet you!