JSConf US 2010: Harder Better Faster Stronger

(Or, my impressions of JSConf US 2010)

I wrote a very ambitious (and partially successful) post last year attempting to recap the first JSConf. I can’t even pretend to repeat that feat this year: track B was so good that I spent half my time in it, and I couldn’t get to everything I wanted to see or everyone I wanted to meet. Kevin Dangoor has good summaries of the talks he attended. And… There Will Be Videos. But there are themes I observed.

 

Four words

First, I offer my apologies to Justin Meyer, who I believe actually put “Harder Better Faster Stronger” in a slide of his presentation on JavaScriptMVC, which I missed most of because there was 200% awesomeness at the conference.

1. Harder: Billy Hoffman’s high-octane security / hacking talk exposed the need to harden your JS as much as possible. For just a taste of “You should be paranoid” stew, go look at Panopticlick as soon as you finish reading this post (or sentence). You are probably uniquely identifiable by the info your browser publicly shares. Then do some reading about timing attacks, especially those by Nate Lawson. Jed Schmidt’s (fab) talk was so hard-core some Tweeters thought its content level was equal to an entire average tech conference. It takes composability and functional programming to the extreme. The confused guy next to me asked, “What would you use this for?” and all I could sputter back was, “anything.” Also, Douglas Crockford supplemented his well-known “good parts” argument by laying down some serious challenges: fix XSS now, and throw away HTML5 and start over.
2. Better: So, the “/be” listed on the schedule turned out to be Brendan Eich. It also turned out that for a lot of the younger attendees, that name didn’t convey any more information than the initials. They know who he is now. His talk was hilarious (if Crock is Chuck Norris, Brendan identifies himself with Bruce Campbell) and inspiring. While JavaScript is rushing ahead (hence the “faster” below), the ECMA committee is still moving forward, and the proposals for Harmony that he explained are all good. We may not need everything they’re considering, but none of it looks detrimental. Block scope, let, splat args, destructuring—I say “awesome.”

   While the ECMA effort’s watchword is “fortitude,” a lot of JSConf’s revelations fall under the heading Don’t wait. People like Tobias Schneider and Dmitry Baranovskiy have taken action to make web browsing better today, by implementing a Flash runtime in JS or writing a JS SVG/VML drawing and animation library.

   Finally, in his talk on 280 North’s Socratic, Francisco Tolmasky made the suggestion that the JavaScript community had an opportunity to get documentation right. Doing so would be a real boon to our efforts to be taken seriously. Although he did not draw the connection, I believe that the success of JUnit as a unit testing tool did a great deal to advance Java, even though unit testing, like everything else, was invented in Smalltalk. JavaScript could enjoy a similar lift from a successful documentation technique.

3. Faster: Faster belongs to Ryan Dahl. Not only is node.js a fearsomely fast server-side JS framework, and not only was Ryan’s talk about making it even faster: the most telling moment of the conference was his comment, during a CommonJS panel, that there was no need for a detailed standard for server-side JS because it hadn’t matured past “toy programs” yet. That turned a few heads. But his comment points out that fifteen years after its creation, JS’s development is accelerating. There were a lot more server-side applications this year, and work on this area is speeding up. Ryan’s bluntness also suggests a dawning period of bare-knuckled competition and invention between server-side inventors that mirrors the red-hot competition between JS engines. Brendan was asked about how ECMA would deal with server-side engines that were turning their backs on standards, and he basically responded that it would take time. When things shake out, he’ll be waiting to help consolidate the best things from the expansion.

   How crazy is it that I just spent a paragraph on “faster” without mentioning Steve Souders? Oh yeah, he was there too, recapping tools and techniques for making your pages load faster. Please go check out webpagetest.org and use Google Page Speed as well as yslow.

4. Stronger: Jenn Lukas gave an excellent talk on making your sites display and work decently without JavaScript. Drawing from her work at Happy Cog, she argued convincingly that we can take accessibility and standards seriously without compromising on content, design, or behavior. She advises you that the first three things she would do to evaluate your web app would be View source, Enlarge text, and Turn off JavaScript. Also, her presentation marked an improvement in the representation of women at the conference this year. Boy is there a long way to go, though (pun intended). Chris and Laura, the organizers, are serious about increasing female attendance—they spent real time on outreach to try to increase diversity—but it’s a hard problem to overcome, and we’re all responsible for solving it. Skipping the pictures of strippers in presentations isn’t enough. We all need to encourage women, personally, to crash the party: all the parties from JSConf up to the whole industry. I hope we succeed, because women make JS twice as strong.

200% Awesome

There was a lot more. Jetpack is awesome. Coffescript is awesome. Pintura is awesome (thanks, Dean Landolt). CouchDB and Sproutcore keep getting awesomer. I’m not the only person who’s composed an ambitious to-do list based on the presentations he saw. I didn’t get to see Matthew Podwysocki and Jeffrey Van Gogh’s Reactive Extensions for JavaScript talk or Aaron Quint’s talk about slowness and quality (which Brendan Eich mentioned he really enjoyed) because I had to go home and get my wife so we could go on the conference boat cruise. Also, I didn’t have time to thank Rick Olsen and Chris Wanstrath personally for everything they’ve contributed to multiple technology communities. I even had to miss most of a talk by John Resig because he was up against Ryan Dahl. That was the only problem with JSConf US 2010: 200% awesome is too much for mortals to absorb.

Last but absolutely not least, thank you thank you thank you, Chris and Laura Williams for making this happen again. I was blown away by the talent that showed, but it wouldn’t have been the conference to be at without the atmosphere that Chris and Laura worked so hard to make feel so easy and fun. From the Friday night party to the boat cruise, the great food, and the game room, it was so easy to meet people, to connect. For Pete’s sake, my wife and I had dinner with Brendan Eich. On a boat. I don’t know how to top that.

JSConf Europe is coming up in September, though. 400% awesome?

Tags: community, LinkedIn, on a boat

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 3:24 pm and is filed under javascript, professional. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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The only thing I would add is awesome and that would belong to the attendees!

Just a quick note: at JSConf, Chris Williams, John Resig, and others called on all JS bloggers to pimp MDC as much as possible. And they’re absolutely right: we should try to push it higher in the search results pages for JavaScript by giving it lots of inbound links. So, here’s my contribution. Go go, Mozilla!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 5:14 pm and is filed under javascript, meta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

Very strong demand to have the community help drive the MDC documentation about JavaScript the language above the maligned W3Cshools site (not linked on purpose) and other sites. We need our documentation to be on the forefront of the SEO path!!!! Look here soon for more details

I had the pleasure and honor of speaking on Google Chrome Frame (slides) at JSConf this past weekend. The conference was small enough that meeting some large percent of the awesome people there was feasible yet large enough that it drew many of the folks doing some of the most interesting work in the JavaScript community today. Frameworks were well represented, as was server-side JS. If you can only go to one conference a year, I can recommend JSConf without reservation. As a speaker, Chris and the organizers treated us better than anyone could hope for, and as an attendee the quality of the content and the hallway conversations left me constantly with the feeling that I was lucky to be where I was but sad that I was probably also missing something else that was awesome.

For some reason Chris — fearless pirate leader that he is — thought it hilarious to have me follow not only Billy Hoffman’s outstanding security talk, but also Brendan Eich’s never-fail wit and delivery. Funny in that “watching people walk the plank…good times” sort of way. I was also between a bunch of people who (apparently) know how to drink and a truly awesome Google-sponsored party. No pressure. None at all.

Somewhat counter-intuitively my talk focused not on what JavaScript can do, but why we’ll be using less of it in the near future; at least for the things we’re currently burning CPU cycles on. HTML5, CSS 3, and developers who are liberated to take advantage of them are going to kill off a lot of code. Take, for example, the slides for my talk. The only JS library that’s included is for prompting users to install Google Chrome Frame. GCF is an attempt to accelerate that transition to new standards and new ways of building apps that go faster. GCF will help us build faster apps not by employing ever-more exotic ways of mangling JavaScript or writing ever-more-complicated systems in the name of performance, but by simplifying what we write and what we send over the wire.

I’ll be talking more about this at Google I/O next month, so if you missed JSConf, hopefully I’ll see you there.

Posted on April 17th, 2010 by Kevin Dangoor

JSConf 2010 Day 1

I missed ScurvyConf entirely, much to my dismay. I got on the plane on time, but then they said they needed to swap out a computer. And then they swapped it out again. And then they gave up, hauled everyone off the plane, had us trudge across the airport and then loaded us up on another plane. I finally arrived at the hotel close to midnight, which is a drag given that I got up at 6:30am.

I started out on Track B. By the way, the notes below are mostly not going to be my opinions, but generally just what the speakers are saying. Sorry if this is a bit raw and unedited…

Chris Williams: How did I do JSConf?

Chris reported spending 200 hours to get JSConf going last year and 120 this year. He pointed out that conference tickets don’t sell out until they sell out… people need to feel like they’re going to be missing out on something and then they’ll sign up. JSConf 2009 was nearly canceled because of lack of interest and then they said “tickets have sold out” and instantly had a waiting list.

There was some additional discussion abiout how JavaScript needs a good website for the language. John Resig pointed out that MDC really has a lot of great information that is not Firefox-specific and is all available under a CC license. There was general agreement that MDC is a great resource, and Chris also mentioned it would be cool if there was a tool that cross-referenced between the JavaScript libraries (eg. $() in jQuery translates to dojo.query, etc…)

Chris is a fun speaker, and he gave us a great view of what goes into planning a conference.

Brian Mitchell: JavaScript’s Twin (Lua)

From a language perspective, Lua and JavaScript are so similar that there’s a temptation to just use JavaScript. But, there are times when Lua is a better choice.

LuaJIT, on some tests, is way faster than v8. It also has very good memory usage characteristics.

“Tables” in Lua are used for both array types and hash types. They’re very well optimized so that they perform like arrays when you use them like arrays. Warning: indexes start at 1.

Local variables need to be declared. Trailing semicolons are optional. Lua uses “end” rather than braces.

Lua has coroutines which makes asynchronous programming look a lot more synchronous.

Dion Almaer and Matt McNulty: web fragmentation on mobile

There’s a proliferation of internet-connected devices that all have SDKs, so it’s hard for developers to figure out how they’re going to support platforms. But, we’ve been there before. Back in the early 80s, you had to decide which computer you’d develop for, and that was it. Then came Windows, but there were still other platforms around… after that came the web, which enabled lots of new companies to grow up building software that could work on any number of devices.

Dion showed Quake II running in a browser using nothing other than HTML5 features. A lot of this is because of the huge speed increases in JavaScript.

There are a bunch of solutions for packaging up web applications for use on different devices. Titanium, Prism, Fluid, Palm’s webOS SDK, etc. all provide ways to provide native-like experiences using nothing other than web technology. jqTouch lets you use normal jQuery-style development for touch-based platforms.

When developing for mobile, these days you have a decision to make about your UI: do you want it to look native to the platform, or do you want to make an immersive experience that is tailored to your app. If you create a UI that is just there to serve your app, that could run nearly unchanged from platform to platform.

Palm’s mojo gives you a nice component model for HTML-based apps. Web apps have a low level model in some ways, compared to GUI components that you get in native platforms.

Matt McNulty announced that Ares is going 1.0 on Monday. Ares is Palm’s browser-based developer environment for webOS. 1.0 adds component APIs you can drag and drop, undo/redo, and a bunch of other features. Matt demoed Ares, and it’s really slick. Ares lets you preview the app in the browser (without the device services, obviously). It also lets you install to the device to see the actual app running.

Ares doesn’t work in IE, and no one really cares. Shockingly few people care about an offline version.

Matt also showed off mojo running in the browser. He had the native Palm mail app running in a normal browser window, which is cool indeed. Webkit browsers are no problem, but they’ve done some monkeypatching to make bits work on Firefox.

Francisco Tomalsky: Socratic documentation tool

We need to rethink how we do docs. Docs in source code are annoying because you have to scroll through them when using the code, you can’t localize them, you need specialized tools that may not yet exist for your language, it’s hard to include rich media (even when videos might make sense), and it increases the already large workload for committers.

Socratic uses the information in TextMate bundles to build up a DOM of your source. Once you do that, you have a query language that’s not unlike jQuery for querying that DOM and pulling out all of the matches.

The other piece is a wiki based on git (rather than docs in your comments). The wiki git repo tracks the branches of your code, so someone can get the docs for a specific version of your project. Socratic also has support for GitHub issues.

The project is not done (actually looks like it’s just getting started, based on the quick demo he gave) and Francisco is inviting people to help. He thinks that a great doc tool in CommonJS JavaScript will get a bunch of people using CommonJS servers.

Francisco then followed up with a demo of the latest Cappuccino release. He mentioned that it is now completely CommonJS-based. You no longer need Ruby at all to work with Cappuccino’s tooling. Also new is a CPTableView that was contributed by an outside contributor. He demoed using IB to create a table view and used nib2cib to convert for Cappuccino’s use.

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I spent the weekend in Washington, DC attending JSConf.US 2010. I wasn’t able to attend last year, due to scheduling conflicts. Javascript is a bit higher on my radar these days, so this was a good year to attend.

The program

The JSConf program was very high quality. Here are some of the talks that I found most interesting.

Yahoo’s Douglas Crockford was up first and describe Javascript as a “a functional language with dynamic objects and a familiar syntax”. He took a some time to discuss some of the features being considered for the next version of Javascript. Most of his talk was focused on the cross site scripting (XSS) problem. He believes the solving the XSS problem should be the top priority of the next version of Javascript, and he feels that this is so urgent that we ought to do a reset of HTML5 in order to focus on this problem. Crockford thinks that HTML5 is only going to make things worse, because it adds new features / complexity. He called out local storage as one feature that would introduce lots of opportunity for XSS exploits. I was very surprised to hear him advocating a security approach based on capabilities. He mentioned the Caja project and his own proposal at www.adsafe.org. He stated that “ECMAScript is being transformed into an Object Capability Language; the Browser must be transformed into an Object Capability system”. This was a very good talk, and it caused a swirl of conversation during the rest of the conference.

Jeremy Ashkenas talked about Coffeescript, which is a language that compiles into Javascript. It has a very functional flavor to it, which was interesting in light of Crockford’s description of Javascript. It also seemed to be influenced by some ideas from Python, at least syntactically. I really liked what I saw, but I’m wary of the fact that it compiles to Javascript. I am not bothered by languages that compile to JVM bytecode, but somehow that feels different to me than compiling to Javascript. I’m going to spend some time playing with it – maybe I’ll get over the compilation thing.

Gordon is a Flash runtime that is implemented in Javascript.   Tobias Schneider caused quite a stir with his talk. He showed several interesting demos of Gordon playing Flash files that were directly generated by tools in the Adobe toolset. Tobias was careful to say that he doesn’t yet implement all of flash, although he definitely wants to get full support for Flash 7 level features. It’s not clear how Gordon would handle newer versions of Flash, because of the differences beween Javascript and Actionscript. Bridging that gap is probably a whole lot of work.

Since 2008 I’ve had several opportunities to hear Erik Meijer talk about his work on Reactive Programming at Microsoft. He’s talked about this work in the context of AJAX, and a common example that he uses is autocompletion in the browser. Jeffrey Van Gogh came to JSConf to talk about RxJS , a library for Javascript which implements these ideas and provides a better experience for doing asynchronous programming, both on the client and server side. In his talk Jeffrey described RxJS bindings for Node.js.  I also met Matt Podwysocki, who I’ve been following on Twitter for some time. Matt has been writing a series of blog posts examining the Reactive Extensions. One hitch in all of this is that the licensing of RxJS is unclear. You can use RxJS in your programs and extend it but it’s not open source, and you can’t distribute RxJS code as part of an open source project. I’m interested in the ideas here, but I haven’t decided whether I am going to actually click on the license.

I dont’ remember the first time that I heard about SproutCore, but I really started paying attention to it when I saw Erich Ocean’s presentation at DjangoCon last year. The original speaker for SproutCore couldn’t make it, but Mike Ball and Evin Grano, two local members of the SproutCore community stepped in to give the talk. Their talk was heavy on demonstrations along with updates on various parts of SproutCore. They showed some very interesting UI’s that were built using SproutCore. The demo that really got my attention was related to the work on touch/multiouch interfaces. NPR had their iPad applications in the App Store on the iPad launch day. Mike and Evin showed a copy of the NPR application that had been built in 2 weeks using SproutCore. The SproutCore version can take advantage of hardware acceleration, and seemed both polished and responsive. Dion Almaer has a screenshot of the NPR app up at Ajaxian.

Raphaël is a Javascript toolkit for doing vector based drawing. It sits on top of either SVG or VML depending on what browser is being used. In the midst of all the hubub about Flash on Apple devices, Dmitry Baranovskiy, the author of Raphaël pointed out that Android devices don’t include SVG, and thus cannot run Raphaël. Apparently people think of Raphaël as something to be used for charts but Baranoskiy showed a number of more general usages of vector drawing that would be applicable to every day web applications.

Steve Souders works on web client performance at Google and has written several books about this topic. His presentation was a conglomeration of material from other talks that he has done. There were plenty of useful tidbits for those looking to improve the performance of their Javascript applications.

Billy Hoffman’s talk on security was very sobering. While Crockford was warning about the dangers of XSS in the abstract, Hoffman presented us with many concrete examples of the ways that Javascript can be exploited to circumvent security measures. A simple example of this was a simple encoding of javascript code as whitespace, so that inspection of a page’s source code would show nothing out of the ordinary to either an uninformed human or to a security scanner.

In the past, Brendan Eich and I have had some conversations in the comments of my blog, but I don’t recall meeting him in person until this weekend. Chris Williams snuck Brendan into JSConf as a surprise for the attendees, and many people were excited to have him there. Brendan covered a number of the features being worked on for the ECMAScript Harmony project, and he feels that the outlook for Javascript as a language is improving. Someone did ask him about Crockford’s call to fix security, and Brendan replied that you can’t just stop and fix security once for all time, but that you need to fix things at various levels all the time. His position was that we need more automation that helps with security, and that the highest leverage places were in the compiler and VM.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the server-side Javascript space. Ever since the competition between Javascript engines heated up two years ago, I’ve been convinced that Javascript on the server could leverage these new Javascript engines and disrupt the PHP/Ruby/Python world. If you subscribe to that line of thinking, then Ryan Dahl’s Node.js is worth noting. Node uses V8 to provide a system to build asynchronous servers. It arrived in the scene last year, and has built up a sizable community despite the fact that It is changing extremely rapidly – Ryan said he would like to “stop breaking the API every day”. In his presentation Ryan showed some benchmarks of Node versus Tornado and nginx, and Node compared pretty favorably. It’s not as fast as nginx, but it’s not that much slower, and it was handily beating Tornado. He showed a case where Node was much slower because V8’s generational garbage collector moves objects in memory. In the example, node was being asked to serve up large files, but because of the issue with V8, it could only write to the result socket indirectly. Ryan added a non-moving Buffer type to Node, which then brought it back to being a close second behind nginx. I was pleased to see that Ryan is very realistic about where Node is at the moment. At one point he said that noone has really built anything on Node that isn’t a toy. If he gets his wish to stabilize the API for Node 0.2, I suspect that we’ll see that change.

Jed Schmidt is a human language translator for his day job. In his off hours he’s created fab.js a DSL for creating asynchronous web applications in Node. Fab is pretty interesting. It has a functional programming flavor to it. I’m interested in comparing it with the RxJS bindings for Node. It’s interesting to see ideas from functional programming (particularly functional reactive programming) percolating into the Javascript server side space. In some ways it’s not surprising, since the event driven style of Node (and Twisted and Tornado) basically forces programmers to write their programs in continuation passing style.

I didn’t get to see Jan Lehnardt’s talk on evently, which is another  interesting application of Javascript (via JQuery) on the server side. I need to make some time to go back and watch Chris Anderson’s screencast on it.

The conference

As far as the conference itself goes, JSConf was well organized, and attendees were well taken care of. The conference reminds me of PyCon in its early days, and that’s my favorite kind of conference to go to. There was very little marketing, lots of technical content, presented by the people that are actually doing the work. I heard lots of cross pollination of ideas in the conversations I participated in, and in conversations that I heard as I walked the halls. I especially liked the idea of “Track B” which was a track that got assembled just in time. It’s not quite the same thing as PyCon’s open spaces, but it was still quite good. Chris and Laura Williams deserve a big hat tip for doing this with a 10 person staff, while closing on a house and getting ready for their first child to arrive.

Last thoughts

The last two years have been very exciting in the Javascript space, and I expect to see things heating up quite a bit more in the next few years. In his closing remarks, Chris Williams noted that last year, there was a single server side Javascript presentation, and this year the content was split 50/50. This is an area that you ignore at your own risk.

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Level-up to JavaScript expert at the Washington D.C. JavaScript Masterclass

March 24th, 2010 by Thomas Fuchs, no comments »

Are you using JavaScript? Or does JavaScript use you? Do you want to know how all the trickery in those shiny frameworks actually works? Want to level up to expert? You can!

Come visit our full-day JavaScript Masterclass in Washington DC, on Friday, April 16, 2010. (That’s the day before JSConf 2010 starts!)

Amy Hoy, teacher extraordinaire and yours truly will show you how to really make JavaScript your bi, ah, strive towards JavaScript excellence.

There are just 25 seats (we like small classes where everyone gets to interact with us!), and we will sell out! We’d hate to hear from your that you wanted to attend but couldn’t grab a seat!

The course is framework-agnostic, so whether you use and love jQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, dojo, YUI or bare-bones JavaScript, you’ll walk away enthused with JavaScript knowledge, and can directly use it in your projects!

Book now and take advantage of our early bird rate of just $550. For that, you’ll get to participate in our full-day workshop, pick our brains, get printed handouts and digital copies of all materials plus a free copy of our JavaScript performance ebook “JavaScript Performance Rocks!” (if you already have it, you can gift it to someone else!). And of course, we also excel in socializing, so yes, you can have beers with us!