Alex is a front-end web developer based out of Austin, TX. He is a co-host of the yayQuery Podcast, a weekly show that targets front-end devs with a quirky sense of humor. As a recent Computer Science graduate of The University of Texas, Alex treats JavaScript like the first-class language that it is and specializes in web application development with jQuery. Alex can often be found helping out newbs in the jquery irc chat on irc.freenode.net as well as on his blog at http://alexsexton.com.
Superclassy Inheritance with JavaScript + Web Performance and JavaScript UI Architecture
2010 is off to a ridiculous start for the JavaScript community and this month, we have TWO incredible topics and two renowned and respected speakers: Alex Sexton and Kyle Simpson.
Superclassy Inheritance with JavaScript
Superclassy Inheritance with JavaScript is a quick look at the benefits and consequences of several inheritance patterns in JavaScript. Code reuse plays a major role in the DRY development pattern and leveraging the inheritance patterns built into JavaScript or manipulating them can change the way you build and organize large applications. Unfortunately, JavaScript's reputation and odd naming scheme have stopped people from using all the features that it has to offer. First, we'll discuss the array of options that exist and then go through a real-world example while using our newly honed inheritance-foo to make it play nice.
Web Performance and JavaScript UI Architecture
Kyle will cover a couple of recent endeavors of mine into improving page- load performance on web sites. One is a set of experiments in various ways to deliver JavaScript code to the browser but to defer its execution until later. Such techniques are particularly well suited to mobile applications, but have some benefit to traditional browser apps as well. The other endeavor is a new site/service just launched at http://2static.it -- a service to provide free sub-domain aliases to create a cookie-free URL to load your static page assets (JS, CSS, images, SWFs, etc).
As time permits, Kyle will also give an intro/preview to both my upcoming talk at Developer-Day Austin and my upcoming talk at SXSW Interactive, on JavaScript UI Architecture. We'll cover a new theory/approach to UI architecture I'm calling CVC (Client-View-Controller), which is a deconstructed variation on the more common MVC pattern. It involves a simple template engine (written in JavaScript) which can run either on the server or in the browser, as well as several JavaScript based "controller" modules.
Sponsor
Austin JavaScript is sponsored this month by WhoLinksToMe. Please thank them for their gracious gifts of pizza and drinks and for their support of the local JavaScript community.