We're back from the AJAX in Action, one of the premier Ajax conferences in Germany. It was the first time I did a qooxdoo talk at a public conference. In May I already had a presentation about JavaScript tooling at the Dynamic Language World, but this time I "officially" presented qooxdoo. My talk was in one of the smaller conference rooms in the basement of the conference center. Since I felt well-prepared I decided to attend the presentation held in the same room right before my talk. The talk was about Silverlight and there were exactly 5 people in the audience. This scared me a bit since I didn't want to talk to an almost empty room. Luckily this didn't happen. The room was filled with about 20-30 people. I was especially happy to find Paul Bakaus the project lead of jQuery UI and dojo commiter Nikolai Onken in the audience. The talk was well received and I think I was able to communicate the philosophy of qooxdoo and its current state. I have uploaded the slides to slideshare.

Since the slides don't work well without my oral presentation you can also download a version containing my presentation notes.

I really enjoyed the conference. Even more than the talks it was the opportunity to meet a lot of interesting people. It was awesome to meet so many German contributors and committers of other JavaScript frameworks. On Thursday evening there was a nice Oktoberfest organized with Leberkäse (meatloaf), Brathendl (grilled chicken) and Maßbierkrüge (1l glasses of beer). We sat together with the dojo guys from uxebu (Wolfram Kriesing, Nikolai Onken and Tobias von Klipstein), Jan Kassens (Mootools), Paul Bakaus (jQuery UI) and Jörg Kress. We had a lot of tech talk, some beer and really a nice evening. Check out the video of our "framework round table" in Tobias' blog post.

Download:

• presentation with notes.

Together with Fabian I did a workshop GUI Development with qooxdoo using the brand new qooxdoo 0.8-alpha1. The workshop was planned for three hours on the workshop day of the Webinale 2008 in Karlsruhe, Germany. It contains these parts:

• Status of 0.8
• First Steps
• Understanding the GUI
• Creating the GUI
• Data Handling
• Making It Work
• Improving the GUI

Due to the fact that the topic is quite advanced, the workshop ended without showing the last third of the presentation.

If you were in the presentation or are interested in a qooxdoo 0.8 workshop, please feel free to download the prepared material (about 13MB). The archive contains a snapshot of the framework folder of qooxdoo. The prebuilt application steps make use of this qooxdoo version (Due to the trunk's nature to change rapidly newer or older versions may not work by the way). You do not need to have a current checkout of qooxdoo's trunk.

Try to follow the described steps on your own. Each snapshot (in the Snapshots folder) contains the full implementation done the corresponding slide. You can find step-by-step code blocks in the Steps folder. At the bottom of some slides you can find a small area where the current step is mentioned. Use this to keep in sync with the snapshot or code block.

If you have questions or comments feel free to post them here or on our mailing list. We are really interested in any feedback for this quite new presentation style (at least for us).

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The following slides were part of a talk about features and implementation of object-oriented JavaScript. The talk was given at Dynamic Languages World, the first European conference dealing with the shared concepts and frameworks of all important dynamic languages (including Ruby, Groovy, PHP, Python and, of course, JavaScript).

The talk attracted quite a number of people. Interestingly, while most of the audience was familiar with JavaScript, some important concepts like closures still seem not to part of the everyday programming arsenal. The native capabilities of JavaScript as a programming language are really fascinating, and frameworks like qooxdoo try to make them as powerful yet comprehensible and practical as possible. Especially if you are new to qooxdoo or object-oriented JavaScript, make sure to read about and also try out qooxdoo's OO syntax and features:

• OO feature summary
• OO documentation
• API Reference

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After Sebastian's presentation on Monday (as part of the Power Workshops) Alexander, Martin and I had our presentations as guest experts.

Alexander's and my presentation covered the low level parts of qooxdoo. Alexander talked about the browser object model a normalized and extended layer for DOM manipulation, event handling and cross browser XMLHTTP communication. After that I continued with a presentation about qooxdoo animation a low level animation package, using the BOM layer.

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Here is the presentation about testing Web apps with Selenium RC.

The presentation has three parts. The first is a very generic introduction to Web testing in general and should be beneficial to people who want to get an orientation in the field; the second part introduces Selenium RC, this should be beneficial for people looking at concrete test products; and the third part shows how to extend Selenium RC with custom code, which should be beneficial for people committed to Selenium RC.

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The slide show is double length, first the normal presentation slides for a quick overview, and then all the slides again with notes which should make it easier to get to grips with the material without the oral narrative.

In one of the last sessions of the Dynamic Languages World I did a talk about JavaScript tooling. My objective was to give a general overview over some current JavaScript tools.

I covered JavaScript linker, tools to generate API documentation, lint tools and JavaScript packer.

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You can download the demo application used in the presentation. I have included a stripped down qooxdoo version so you can just download and run it.

So, this was it. We're back from the conference, still a bit numb with this anti-climactic feeling you get after those events. Yesterday was the final conference day, and most of us stayed until the very end joining in into the final sessions. I enjoyed a very lively talk by Steve Bristol of lesseverything who shed some light onto how Rails deploys JavaScript. Andreas and Fabian delivered their presentations to an interested audience. Again, there was a lot of interest in fundamental issues of JavaScript software engineering as people seem to get ready to embark on more ambitious projects, beyond spicing up a Web page with a few inline JavaScript statements. Some showed real awe when faced with the fact that you can do JavaScript projects with a couple of hundreds of classes :-).

Now we're settling back in for normal project work, while still tying up some loose ends, looking through notes and getting presentation material ready for further use.

Yesterday none of us gave a presentation, so we were mostly off roaming the offerings of the conference program. It was the first day of the main conference, and we saw much more traffic, especially at the booth. People were friendly and interested, but mainly focusing on qooxdoo as a technology, and much less on qooxdoo as a project the might consider joining. I attended a keynote presentation given by Neal Ford of ThoughtWorks on "Essence vs Ceremony". He very intriguingly pointed out that we are fighting too much "accidential" complexity in our projects, and that we should lean towards languages that allow us to focus on essentials, rather than burdening us with ceremony. A measure for that was the distance between intention and result. Well said! As far as implementation languages go, Ruby, Groovy and PHP are strongly represented at the conference.

Today, Andreas, Fabian and myself are scheduled for their presentations. Mine about Web testing was well received this morning, while Fabian is talking about JavaScript tooling later in the afternoon, and Andreas is giving actually two presentations, one about object-oriented JavaScript (in the Dynamic Languages World) and one about qooxdoo (in the "RIA Day" track of the webinale). We'll be back with more!

Yesterday saw the first day of the joint Webinale/Dynamic Languages World conferences. Actually, it was one of those prequel workshop days (the actual conferences starting today), featuring two qooxdoo sessions in the "Power Workshops" track, both mainly based on the upcoming 0.8 release. Sebastian and Fabian presented the framework in the morning session, walking the audience through incremental stages of developing one of our showcases, the feedreader. In the afternoon, Sebastian again presented the new build system, with jobs, parts, variants etc. in all their glory. Alex, Johnny and Martin followed up highlighting the new low level layer, animations and the Inspector, respectively.

The sessions were well received, with about 15 people attending in the morning and about 25 in the afternoon. There seemed to be quite a mix of people both with strong backgrounds in web application and Javascript development, and those that are just starting to move into this area or are looking for a platform to build their work upon.

We'll be uploading presentations and more after the conference.

If you ever wanted to meet a whole bunch of qooxdoo core developers at once, there's a good chance to do so on May 26-28, 2008: Two conferences will be held in the city of Karlsruhe (Germany), where most of the qooxdoo framework developers work at 1&1. Excitingly, many team members will participate in the event as speakers, covering quite a wide range of topics, including brand new qooxdoo 0.8 features as well as modern web technologies in general.

Both conferences take place at the same time and location. The first one is the webinale, a well-known German web conference. Most of the talks will be given in German, and so will the following (titles translated to English):

Two power workshops (3 hours each) will focus on features and tools of the upcoming qooxdoo 0.8:

• GUI Development with qooxdoo (Sebastian Werner, Fabian Jakobs) - in German
• Advanced Web Application Development (Sebastian Werner + other core developers) - in German

A session within the "RIA day" track will show how qooxdoo stands up to other technologies:

• qooxdoo - Killer apps for all browsers (Andreas Ecker) - in German

Dynamic Languages World Europe is the first European conference dealing with the shared concepts and frameworks of all important dynamic languages. Of course, we made sure that JavaScript is in the mix. This is an international conference with all the sessions given in English:

• Advanced Object-Oriented JavaScript (Andreas Ecker) - in English
• Selenium RC: Automated Testing of Modern Web Applications (Thomas Herchenröder) - in English
• JavaScript Tooling - Minimize, Lint & Co (Fabian Jakobs) - in English

A great opportunity (at least for the German qooxdoo community) to meet us at these conferences, getting a fair amount of qooxdoo overdose and hanging out with us for a beer or two. If you are interested, let us know.