JSConf 2009 – Where were you?

To say that JSConf 2009 was a whirlwind isn’t giving it’s creators enough credit. A few ways I’d describe it are action packed, intimate, and collaborative. From talking with Chris Williams, that was the goal.

The Overview

Obviously, as the people who were at my talk noticed, I’m not an artist. But, this gives you a bit of an idea of how the conference was laid out. To the left you have the main presentation room, Track A. To the bottom right you have the Track B room. And, in the upper right hand corner was the Hack room, aka the Hack Track.

The point of Track A was to present some information that would take a much longer amount of time to really get across. Ideally the presentations were on a single topic and lasted about 30 – 50 minutes depending on how much room you wanted to leave for questions. Track B was to be able to present on some topic that didn’t need a full 30+ minutes. The idea here was to have more of a discussion format, hence the single large table that allowed for everyone to face each other. Then, the hack track was to encourage people to sit down and just code. The two twinkies/equals sign represent the food area. All I have to say is bacon…nuff said. The food was excellent to say the least and no, there were no twinkies…I’m just a horrible artist.

There was one track that I couldn’t really show on my diagram. This track was the Significant Other track hosted by Laura Williams. The Significant Other track was a way for us techies to bring our…you guessed it…significant others, but not let them sit in a hotel room or staring at a screen of geek speak. Instead these people were taken around DC to do the touristy thing, checking out the monuments, the White House, and so on. Then they even had a shopping trip planned in Old Town Alexandria. No other conference I’ve been to had this _feature_ and nobody I’ve talked to has had that either. /cheer

When I say I was impressed with everything that Chris and Laura did for this conference, I’m not giving them enough credit.

Interesting

From what I was hearing in the crowd, the topics that people brought to the table in both Track A and B satisfied everyone’s appetite. The topics ranged from client side games in JS to Objective-J to server side JS. There were topics on ORMs, distributed browser testing, and data sources. I also recall there being a Track B session on creating midi’s with JS.

Because I am interested in everything, I like learning, I’m just going to pick a few talks that haven’t gotten much in the way of publicity yet that I found fairly intriguing.

OpenGL and Real Time Simulation

Andrew Turner spoke about some work that he and his company have been doing with integrating JS and really high powered graphics engines. As any of you who know me know, I’m really into in 3D engines. Some of what Andrew and his team have built is the ability to create objects within the worlds they’ve developed by using nothing more than JS. You can control many of the elements in the engine with just JS. This means that those people who were originally deemed “just web developers” now have the ability to join teams of game developers/designers to really have a hand in the outcome of a game. While you could use most any scripting language, the number of people who know javascript is quite vast and the concept lends itself to that mass of people.

I couldn’t find Andrew’s slides anywhere. If you can, send me a link.

Client Side Gaming

Games on the client side are an interesting subject in and of itself not only because they are games, but because of the challenges presented. John Resig talked about his approach to making client side games with Javascript and some of the issues. One of the issues and solutions that I really found interesting was his approach to tackling cheating. If you take a game like World of Warcraft, much of the game is controlled by the physics, money, and items you carry. Imagine that you had an interface to give that mighty sword of killing a +300 to damage. While that doesn’t exist in World of Warcraft, most web people use a tool called Firebug. So, we do! Suddenly we can’t rely on the client (browser) to give us accurate information about the user. This dilemma means that we need to have the client pass us specific information however, anything other than “attack” or “move” should be controlled on the backend.

John also talked about the issues around a game he’s working on called Deep Leap. The approach he has taken here to curbing cheating is by replaying the game on the server side. So, in essence he records all the “moves” and pieces that exist and then uses the same JS on the server side that can be done on the client side. This is a really great idea. You are using the same code base which means you only have one bit of code to maintain and it’s a really simple way to remove cheating.

Take a look at John’s slides

Server Side JS

There were a few presentations about SSJS. Kris Zyp, James Duncan, and I all gave Track A talks on our respective frameworks. And, Kevin Dangoor held a Track B discussion on what the #ServerJS group is doing to standardize SSJS. I don’t bring this up to make a plug for the framework I work on. I bring this up as just an example of the number of frameworks popping up with some power behind them and to make mention of the stuff the server JS group is doing.

The #ServerJs group has been working to standardize libraries and modules that plug into SSJS frameworks. One of the issues plaguing the SSJS world is the utter lack of standard libraries. Python, PHP, RoR, etc. all have massive communities behind them because they have huge library sets. But, most of the JS world has been client side till now. So where are the libraries for reading files? What about just the ability to pull libraries in a standard way? None of this has existed till now. So, while we, the framework developers, go about making these tools for people, we can’t really expect anyone to switch over without some basic level of library support. If you are interested at all in SSJS I highly recommend taking a look at the Google Group and contributing to the discussions.

View Kris’ presentation on the Persevere framework

Take a gander at my slides from JS Conf on Axiom Stack

I couldn’t find James’ slides anywhere. If you can, send me a link.

Others

Some others that I wanted to mention include Titanium App by Jeff Haynie, Real Time Web with XMPP by Jack Moffitt, and CouchDB to the Edge by Chris Anderson and Jan Lehnardt.

Fin

JS Conf 2009 was a flurry of information and great ideas. To say it was awesome is insulting.

Hopefully, I will see you all at JS Conf 2010. Till then, keep up the good fight.