ParisJS #8
30 Jun 2011(The whole conferences were in french, but as I'm writing every post on my blog in english, I'll write this one too.)
Tonight I was attenting the 8th parisjs meetup. We had the chance to have it hosted at Valtech, in a very wealthy part of Paris, in somptuous quarters and a large room with giant screen (and great pizzas too).
Anyway, this time the meetup was split in two : first part was made of complete talks, while second part only had small lightning talks. With pizza and beer in between.
Wakanda
The first talk was about Wakanda. Wakanda is a complete suite of client/server Javascript which goal is to help create business oriented apps. It is created by the same company as 4D, but this time is completly open source.
The product seemed well done, but kinda monolithic : server side js, client side javascript framework, application studio, debugguer.
I can surely see it used for creating Intranet applications, for some very specific business cases. I have an ambiguous feeling about Wakanda. I think they did a very good job, the whole package seems really neat, the IDE is clear, client/server communication is smooth, etc. On the other hand I'm always suspicious of apps that can do everything.
(Note that I didn't try the product, I only heard about it tonight for the first time and watched a 20min presentation so that's a little light for me to give a precise opinion)
Joshfire Framework
A few months ago, @sylvinus from Joshfire told us that they planned to realease their framework, modeslty named Joshfire.
This is by far the most interesting presentation of the meetup. Joshfire is a javascript framework aimed at working seamlessly between any devices : desktop, mobile, iPad, TV, anything.
It's basic idea is to abstract to its bare bone any interaction. From what I remember, for any "page" you want to define you have to write two JSON structures.
One defines the data tree (what your data is), the other defines the UI tree (how your data can be interacted with). It also ships with some adapters (an adapter is the link between the UI Tree and a specific device).
All you have to do to port your Joshfire app to a new device is to write (or grab if it already exists) an adapter. The main logic and data code is the same for every device, the maintenance is now only focused on any specific device.
Even if the main idea of Joshfire is awesome, their documentation and licensing is even more awesome : the project is already completly documented, with examples and is also completly free and available on github.
CSON, no sorry, JISON
@jie was supposed to talk about CSON, a compressed JSON. But as he already gave a very similar talk (about BSON) at the last
parisnode event, he changed the subject.
I'm not really sure what the real subject of the talk was. I think he mentionned compiling Javascript into Javascript (much like CoffeeScript), but it eventually turned into a Jison demo.
Jison seems to be a tool for automating lexing and parsing languages, to output new code. In effect, this could allow for transforming a custom language into an existing language. CoffeeScript, Haml or Sass works that way : they take a new language as input, and return Js, Html or Css as output.
The advantages are that the custom language is usually much more concise, easy to write and easy to read.
Anyway, this presentation was full of nice quotes :
The language I'm about to show you is totally useless.
Pipe ? What is that ? Oh, you mean the strokes.
The bad thing about Jison is that its documentation is crap
Why does it work ? It was supposed to fail !
Overview of a dev life
This talk wasn't about any new shiny technology. It was about those old browsers and bad habits we had 10 years ago, and how we still managed to make great websites.
This remind me of the "good ol' days" when I discovered the web with FrontPage and ClaraSoft. When IE6 was considered a modern browser.
@molokoloco show us that he managed to simulate ajax using nested iframe, had a website still online and running even after 10 years, was able to code full websites in 3 days, and had read more than 50.000 blog posts. And all that while still using Windows and Dreamweaver.
(Small side note : I praise both @molokoloco and @jie for what they managed to do. I know how easy it is to procrastinate and configure UI, test new tools and IDE instead of getting things done. That didn't seem to be an issue for them.)
mongoDB
This talk was the first in the serie of lightning talks (less than 20mn). It was about mongoDB and how to integrate it in a nodejs app.
As I had never tried nor nodejs nor mongoDB I didn't quite grasp what it was really about. All I get is that in order to get a result from a mongoDB query, one have to go through 3 steps of connection to the DB. In the asynchronous world of nodejs, this doesn't work well, so each step has to fire a callback once executed.
From there, I was lost. There was something about manually calling a callback once initialized, but honestly I didn't get it.
Anyway, I learned from a small talk during pizza time that mongoDB was better than couchDB (performance-wise), and that one have to sacrifice binding to the altar of redundancy to get really fast response time.
Audio demo in less than 1kB. No, 800B. No, wait, 200B
This time the talk was a very fun demo. Using some simple minification techniques, Js was able to play a random music.
This involved encoding the wav file in base64 (taking special care of some chars), and then playing it in an audio tag. Adding a bit of random to play a different note on each loop.
Fun, but interesting.
Some words about the Observer Pattern
This talk was more about theory than practice. Maybe it was the late hour, but it didn't catch my attention as the other did. Maybe someone would re-explain it to me ?
Well, I got the general idea : coding a js snippet that hard code the name of the elements that should react is bad practice because of the maintanability nightmare it cause when elements are removed.
Instead, the speaker advocate the use of a MessageBroker. Some kind of general listener that then dispatch event to element registered to that event (am I right ?).
Then someone in the audience noted that the opposite pattern should work better : that every element registered itself to an event and react when such event is fired (am I still right ?)
Honestly, I really am not sure about this talk, so if anyone could fill the blanks and correct me, I'd be glad.
Sencha and Sencha Touch
I won't go into too much detail on that talk. This was a generic presentation of Sencha (formerly known as ExtJs). I already had the basic understanding of ExtJs (but not the expertise of some of the ExtJs experts in the room), so I was really only half listening.
Sencha is a great product. It is very similar to what Wakanda was showing in the first talk. It is destined to data-heavy applications with lots of numbers, columns, charts, pies, etc.
Sencha Touch is a mobile version of Sencha. It is iOS oriented and emulate the standard UI elements in HTML.
Mozilla Labs
A quick list of the Mozilla Labs projects. I honestly don't remember them all, except Tilt that is a 3D viewer of any web page. It simply calculate the DOM depth and create a pyramid-like structure that you can browser in 3D.
I'm sure that beyond the cool and shiny aspect, it can be useful as a debug/optimisation tool.
Conclusion
Once again, thanks to #parisjs for those talks, always inspiring and a way to meet new people.
For all the new readers, I have an unfixed bug in my comment section : your post can be invalidated if your are using Chrome with an email auto-filler. My custom anti-spam will flag you as spam because Chrome fills an hidden honeypot field.
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