You know how the web has become a much more enjoyable medium over the past couple of years? All this “web 2.0” user experience candy? A huge part of the reason is Mozilla Firefox and the way it’s gained significant market share. The Mozilla Foundation has used this market share to champion open standards instead of proprietary technologies in the browser experience. One of the major advances has been in the use of JavaScript, which brings us to a discussion of John Resig.
John is a Mozilla Evangelist and the lead developer of jQuery. Here is what Justin at FreshBooks has to say about jQuery:
jQuery is hugely important for a number of reasons.
First, by abstracting over heinous cross-browser compatibility issues, developers are encouraged to build rich web applications without being afraid that their slick designs will turn into a flaming ball of terrible at the most inopportune of times.
Second, while jQuery isn’t unique in this regard, I think it’s safe to say that it sets the Javascript Rockstar bar particularly low by providing an API that enables users to accomplish a lot with very little code.
Third, it actually makes it _easier_ to do The Right Thing than to do the “quick-and-dirty-get-it-done-as-fast-as-humanly-possible” way that leads to unmaintainable and unreadable code that you would never publicly admit to writing.
In case I did not mention it, Justin is a bit of a jQuery booster, but he is also our resident software philosopher and I respect his opinion immensely.
Anyway, back to John. He is coming to give a workshop for designers called, “Building Interactive Prototypes with jQuery” – that may sound like it’s for developers, but it’s not – its for designers. Here’s the full description:
The prototyping process is a delicate dance of writing the smallest amount of code needed to create a compelling demo. This challenge is compounded by the fact that designers typically have to wait on their development teams for, seemingly simple, results. Why not circumvent the whole process by writing your own interactive JavaScript code using a JavaScript library, jQuery, that understands how unobtrusive, CSS-based, design works.
This will be a hands-on demonstration, so please bring your laptop.
Please remember to tell all the web developers, designers and project managers you know about meshU. It occurs to me that entrepreneurs and/or anyone building a web application will want to be there too. Tickets are $239, which is positively a steal for this kind of content. Hope you can make it.
