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.
4 Comments
The title of your talk reminds me of what my Brazilian friends used to say: “Brazil, land of the future, and always will be”.
if i’m not mistaken the grailsUI plugin uses YUI libs. if jQuery is the future (in ur opinion) then do u plan on coming up with something like a GUI 2.0 which is re-written using jQuery?
or am i just being silly and getting all confused here??
@rawkafella You are right that GrailsUI uses YUI exclusively. And yes, I think jQuery is the future of JavaScript libraries, but that is mostly because of the selector engine (sizzle.js). YUI3, which is still in beta (but not for long), has learned a lot from jQuery, including selectors. So I think GrailsUI will most likely use jQuery or YUI3. Either way, it will be unobtrusive, which is very different from how the current GrailsUI operates.
@Matt jQuery does seem to have grown rapidly. i havent dug around much in it but so far my only grouch has been its syntax. it almost seems illogical or shud i say obfuscated at first. i wonder WHY devs have to make syntactical grammar so complicated for things as good as jQuery. same with RoR.
maybe ur inclusion of either of the two will depend on their latest benchmarks. and since it wont really matter for GUI, its all good!