This is the JavaScript Conference page for 2009, for the latest and greatest JavaScript conference, check out http://full-frontal.org

Full Frontal

JavaScript Conference

Buy a ticket now - One day conference £129

full-fron•tal (JavaScript):
with nothing concealed or held back. more

Speakers

Christian Heilmann speaking

Christian Heilmann - 9.55am

Web Architect and standards evangelist at Yahoo UK: Frontloaded and zipped up - do loose types sink ships.

Christian Heilmann is a geek and hacker by heart. He's been a professional web developer for about eleven years and worked his way through several agencies up to Yahoo where he delivered Yahoo Maps Europe and Yahoo Answers.

He's written two and contributed to three books on JavaScript, web development and accessibility, lead distributed teams as a manager and made them work with one another and released dozens of online articles and hundreds of blog posts in the last few years.

He's been nominated standards champion of the year 2008 by .net magazine in the UK and currently sports the fashionable job title "International Developer Evangelist" spending his time going from conference to conference and university to university to speak and train people on systems provided by Yahoo and other web companies that want to make this web thing work well for everybody.

Frontloaded and zipped up - do loose types sink ships?

JavaScript had a bumpy ride up to now, from its origins as a CGI-replacement, initiator of countless popups and annoying effects over the renaissance as Ajax enabler up to becoming wrapped up in libraries to work around the hell that is browser differences.

With the ubiquity of JavaScript comes a new challenge. How do we keep JavaScript safe when browsers don't really distinguish between different sources and give them all the same rights? Why do we still judge the usefulness of JavaScript by how badly browsers speak it?

Learn about some environments you can use JavaScript in securely and marvel at the magic and annoyances that are technologies that try to put a lock on the issue of JavaScript security.

Christian's slides

Christian's talk (mp3 25Mb)

Robert Nyman speaking

Robert Nyman - 11.10am

Working in the frontend since 1998, talking about JavaScript: from birth to closure.

Robert has been working with web developing, mostly interface coding, since 1998. His biggest interests lies in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, where especially JavaScript has been a love for quite some time. He regularly blogs at robertnyman.com about web developing, and is running/partaking in a number of open source projects.

JavaScript: from birth to closure

This presentation will give you a brief background to JavaScript, what it is and where it comes from. Then it will walk you through general pitfalls, best practices and more advanced topics such as object-orientation, scope and closures.

Robert's slides

Roberts's talk (mp3 22Mb)

Peter-Paul Koch speaking

Peter-Paul Koch - 11.55am

The author of the infinitely useful QuirksMode talking about: W3C Widgets.

Peter-Paul Koch is a freelance front-end consultant, agent, and trainer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has won international renown with his browser compatibility research, frequently speaks at conferences, has founded Fronteers, the Dutch association of front-end professionals, and advises browser vendors on their implementation of the web standards.

On the Web he is universally known as ppk.

His grandfather was a coffee planter on Java, so he is genetically predetermined to be an expert on most languages that have "Java" in their name.

W3C Widgets

In this session we'll discuss W3C Widgets and why they are the future of the mobile Web. We'll also take a look at various practical problems that surround the creation of W3C Widgets and mobile websites. Although web developers are well prepared for many of the browser incompatibilities they're sure to encounter, there are some special problems that occur only on mobile devices. We will discuss these problems.

If the mobile web is new to you you'll be shocked by the sheer size of the problems mobile devices create, and the sheer depth of our ignorance. Nonetheless, there is a thin ray of light at the end of the tunnel, and we'll end on a more positive note by looking to the future.

PPK's slides

PPK's talk (mp3 23Mb)

Stuart Langridge speaking

Stuart Langridge - 2.10pm

Stuart is a web hacker, author, and speaker living in the UK, talking about: New things that HTML5 provides to JavaScript hackers.

He writes books about JavaScript and convinces people to use Ubuntu, and also works for Canonical creating online services and travels around the world talking about it.

Code and writings (and the occasional rant) are to be found at kryogenix.org; Stuart is to be found outside in the rain looking for the smoking area.

New things that HTML5 provides to JavaScript hackers

HTML5 brings new and exciting JavaScript things within our reach. Browser manufacturers are constantly changing and improving their JavaScript engines to give us, the web hackers, abilities that we never had before.

Here you'll find information on the parts that are coming up that maybe you knew about, the parts coming up that you may be excited to discover, and some thoughts on what's standing between us and greatness.

Stuarts's talk (mp3 22Mb)

Todd Kloots speaking

Todd Kloots - 2.55pm

Frontend engineer working on the YUI library, talking about More accessible user interfaces with ARIA.

Todd Kloots is a frontend engineer based in San Francisco. With ten years of industry experience, Todd has spent the past seven years at Yahoo! working on products such as Yahoo! Mail, and most-recently, the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library.

Through his role at Yahoo! Todd evangelises the use of web standards, is an advocate for accessibility, and a frequent contributor to the YUI Blog. When he's not writing code, Todd can be found working on his other passion: hunting down the perfect cup of espresso in cafes in San Francisco.

More accessible user interfaces with ARIA

ARIA is a W3C specification that can be used to dramatically improve the accessibility of DHTML widgets and rich interaction patterns (like drag and drop). This talk provides practical tips and design patterns for using ARIA to create accessible user interfaces that work across all of the various combinations of browsers and assistive technology that support ARIA.

Additionally, this talk will focus on the tools and methodologies developers need to test ARIA in order to ensure the best possible user experience.

Todd's slides

Todd's talk (mp3 23Mb)

Jake Archibald speaking

Jake Archibald - 4.10pm

Jake worked on the BBC's Glow JavaScript library, talking about: Optimising where it hurts.

Jake Archibald is a client-side web developer at the BBC working on Glow, a JavaScript library developed to meet the corporation’s design and accessibility standards. He also works with the BBC’s working groups which research and develop the corporation's technical Standards & Guidelines.

Outside of the BBC, Jake is a keen photographer, photoshopper, and keeps in touch with his previous life as a Flash & PHP developer.

Optimising where it hurts

As the amount of JavaScript we use on our pages increases, as does its effect on page performance. Even when browsers manage to produce the same output, how they reach that output can be very different. Some optimisations aren’t obvious, others can be easily broken by seemingly unrelated statements. So, how do we get the most out of our code?

In this session we'll challenge assumptions about performance, using practical code to demonstrate the optimisations that really make a difference, and why they make a difference.

Jake's slides

Jake's talk (mp3 21Mb)

Simon Willison speaking

Simon Willison - 4.55pm

International speaker and renowned developer, talking about Web API mischief with JavaScript.

Simon Willison is a speaker, writer, developer and all-round web technology enthusiast. Simon works for Guardian News and Media as a technical architect for both guardian.co.uk and the forthcoming Guardian Developer Network. Before joining the Guardian Simon worked as a consultant for clients that included the BBC, Automattic and GCap Media.

Simon is a past member of Yahoo!'s Technology Development team, where his projects included the initial prototype of FireEagle, Yahoo!'s location broker API. Prior to Yahoo! he worked at the Lawrence Journal-World, an award winning local newspaper in Kansas.

Simon is a co-creator of the Django web framework, and a passionate advocate for Open Source and standards-based development. He maintains a popular Web development weblog at simonwillison.net

Web API mischief with JavaScript

JSON-P and other cross-domain skullduggery have enabled mashup possibilities far beyond JavaScript's original remit. Discover tricks for blasting apart the same origin policy and exploiting online services to build all manner of intriguing applications using nothing more than a sprinkling of JavaScript and static HTML.

Learn how HTML5 will embrace such trickery and make JavaScript the natural choice for combining data in interesting new ways.

Simon's write up

Simon's talk (mp3 21Mb)