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: