jQuery Conference

I was able to attend the jQuery Boston 2010 conference a while back thanks to my employer and it was a pretty good experience. Conferences are pretty good events to go to for socializing/networking with like minded people and to learn some new tips and tricks. Since I am not the most sociable person in the world, it was lucky that I did indeed learn some new things about jQuery and JavaScript in general.

The two keynote talks were on jQuery, jQuery UI, and the upcoming jQuery Mobile. jQuery 1.4.3 was released on the first day of the conference and even though the number says it is just bug fix type release there were some new features added. The data link feature was added to 1.4.3 and the beta of the templating engine was also released as a separate official jQuery plugin. Javascript templates is a new concept for me and while I have never become a fan of template engine in PHP, we will see how well I will like (or not like) javascript templates.

The biggest thing I learned was on the testing side of javascript development (and not just that I should be tested which I currently don't doing as much as I should). Something I think I am going to be integrating into my jQuery/Javascript development more often is the use of QUnit for javascript unit testing. I also learned about 2 other utilities called mockjax and mockjson. Those utilities allow you to fake remote ajax and json requests which allow for some nice debugging and testing functionality (like being able to simulate a timeout request and making sure you code handles it gracefully). Another cool tool I learned about was pubsub which allow you to trigger global events and listen for those global events and perform actions when they are raised. Now technically this can be done with jQuery custom events but pubsub is a lot faster (and I think a little bit clean too).

I can't wait until I can start putting some of the stuff I learning into action (I have already played around with a few things like subpub and the jQuery template engine).