JavaScript Coding with Class
I've spent the last two weeks in London, eating fish'n'chips, drinking cup'o'tea, and being a hooligan at the Arsenal. Oh yeah, there was a MooTools hackathon too. The MooTools hackathon was hugely successful and I'll be providing more detail about what was accomplished and where MooTools is going over the coming weeks. It was also great to meet some of the development team in person instead of simple IRC. MooTools FTW!
Another exciting part of my time in London was presenting at London Ajax. My presentation was called "JavaScript Coding with Class", preaching the values of class-based JavaScript frameworks like MooTools and Dojo. I kept the talk high-level but I'm confident I got my point across, showing the value of class structures.
This was my first time presenting this deck, so let me know if you see room for improvement (outside of the billion "um's" I used.)
Due to popular request, my slides have been embedded above.
![Camera and Video Control with HTML5]()
Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs. Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop. One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...
![JavaScript Promise API]()
While synchronous code is easier to follow and debug, async is generally better for performance and flexibility. Why "hold up the show" when you can trigger numerous requests at once and then handle them when each is ready? Promises are becoming a big part of the JavaScript world...
![CSS Sprites]()
The idea of CSS sprites is pretty genius. For those of you who don't know the idea of a sprite, a sprite is basically multiple graphics compiled into one image. The advantages of using sprites are:
Fewer images for the browser to download, which means...
![Pure CSS Slide Up and Slide Down]()
If I can avoid using JavaScript for element animations, I'm incredibly happy and driven to do so. They're more efficient, don't require a JavaScript framework to manage steps, and they're more elegant. One effect that is difficult to nail down with pure CSS is sliding up...
There was one question I wanted to ask you on Tuesday: Do you think JavaScript is ever going to get proper built-in class support? What is is the likelihood of that? What is preventing this from happening?
I doubt it — it takes forever to get official changes to the ECMAScript standard, and Google seems intent on killing JavaScript.