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I’m really looking forward to attending the upcoming Unsheffield event which kicks off next Friday evening. It is brought to you by the same team that organised BarCampSheffieldII last year, but they felt that they wanted to deviate a little from the standard BarCamp format, hence the rebranding of this new event.

I will endeavour to write more about the event during or shortly afterwards.

The Why and Which of JavaScript Libraries

John Resig took us through various scenarios when you write JavaScript:

• Plug & Play:
  Drop in a widget, little or no JavaScript knowledge required, just customise some options and go – no flexibility
• Some assembly required:
  Write common utilities, use pre-made code to distance yourself from browser bugs – flexible, until you hit a browser bug
• Down and dirty:
  Write all code from scratch, deal directly with bugs, quirksmode can save your life – eccessively flexible – almost too flexible
• Use JavaScript library:
  Makes JavaScript bearable, gets the job done fast, simplifies cross-browser support – easily customisable

John then did a comparison between the various JavaScript libraries, including jQuery, Prototype, YUI and Dojo, which are commonly in use. A developer survey showed that jQuery and Prototype were used by around 32% of developers; YUI was 22% and others around 14%.

John’s full slides give much more detail of each library’s strengths.

John’s presentation: slides (slideshare) | audio (mp3)

Professional Front-End Engineering

Nate Koechley

Nate began by giving us a bit of historical context to the way Yahoo! has evolved over the years.

He then covered topics such as Yahoo’s server architecture, graded browser support [see below], progressive enhancement, unobtrusive JavaScript etc.

He suggests we all have an interesting set of decisions to make regarding front-end design:

1. Do what is standard
   if impossible, then
2. Do what is common
   if impossible, then
3. Do what it takes

Then we get on to:

1. Do what is simple
   +
2. Do what is flexible & progressive
   +
3. Do what is open

This is in order to satisfy the multiple audiences for any website: Users, Developers, Machines.

At Yahoo!, they focus on 8 specific areas:

1. HTML
2. CSS
3. JavaScript
4. Accessibility
5. Internationalisation
6. Performance
7. Infrastructre & Process
8. Tooling

They use tools such as JSLint to check code for quality, and adopt the idioms it promotes to improve their code. Also, unit testing with YUI Test.

There’s much more detail in his slides (see below).

Nate’s presentation: slides (blog/slideshare) | audio (mp3)