Thursday, April 21, 2011

jQuery Bay Area Conference - presentation, meetings and movements

I just got back from speaking at this jQuery Conference Bay Area Conference last weekend, so this is a quick blog to provide some links.

This was the official jQuery Conference, which is held twice a year. So all the key members of the jQuery team and community were there.
  • 29 presentations over two days
  •  About 500 participants
  • Other presenters included John Resig, Yehuda Katz, Paul Irish, and others who you can see here
My Presentation
I spoke about “Harnessing jQuery Templates and Data Link, to build dynamic data-driven browser apps”.
The presentation was in three sections:
  • Discussion of App Scenarios for data and templates in the client, and example demo app
  • Templates today: walkthrough of all the main features
  • Templates ‘tomorrow’: preview of current work on really fast responsive interactive client-side views, integrating jQuery Templates and Data Linking. (Demo)
The slides are here

Meetings and movements
I had some great meetings and discussions with other developers and open-source community members. Definitely declarative binding of templated views to observable data is ‘in the air’, and there is clearly a huge interest in related scenarios and patterns like client-side MVVM or MVC. We were already doing much of this in Microsoft AJAX Preview 6 with observable objects and arrays and declarative bindings in templates, but it was not known to many. My hope is that the current JsViews integration of data link and templating we are working on will break new ground in this area, but this time within a simpler leaner approach, and in synergy with jQuery. People are looking for fast lightweight declarative frameworks of this kind. 

Update: I have published the demo pages above on GitHub as live pages, and have updated the links above to point to the new pages.

The new content is as follows:

3 comments:

  1. Borris, any chance you could do a couple of blog posts about the new features and common techniques using JsView / JsRender? That would help people getting started on this new version of Templating and Binding.

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  2. Also, are you planning on implementing Commands in the JsView. (i.e. data-command="[doSomethingCommand]" data-commandEventType="[click]") and in the viewModel that you link to do the binding you would have a function called doSomethingCommand that on click (or whatever the commandEventType is set as use that as your string input for delegate) of that element that data-command is set on it will automatically run that function and pass in this as the context of the element and maybe the view object to get the data bound to that item. I am slowly wrapping my head around all of these things. As I said, having someone at microsoft do a series of blog posts on all of these awesome changes you are doing would be extremely helpful.

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  3. @Corey: Yes, absolutely, I hope to do some blog posts on JsViews and JsRender, but it'll be a bit longer before I do that. My priority at the moment is stabilizing on the code, and completing the feature set to cover primary scenarios, then to start documenting and blogging. Sorry not to have more help available sooner, but really right now it is still in incubation mode. Hopefully the wait will have been worth it :).

    As you say, a 'commands' or actions feature could be very valuable, and I plan to include support in that area, but I anticipate that it will be after the first round of documentation referred to above...

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