Sessions at Software Architect 2011 about Web Development on Thursday 20th October

For the last few years, the web has been all atwitter about Web 2.0 (and even the occasional reference to Web 3.0). Yes, the days of static web applications are officially over and while libraries like jQuery and Prototype make it easier to build modern applications, ultimately they are papering over issues in the web standards (and the browsers that implement them). Today we’re building to standards that are from the palaeolithic era of web design, but that’s changing – and HTML5 is a large part of that. In this talk, we’ll discus just what HTML5 is and why it matters. We’ll show how you can build to HTML5 today and which browsers support what. Thankfully, after many years of stagnation, the future of web applications looks bright!

This class presents three user-interface architectures suitable for (or at least used by) distributed, typically web or cloud-based, applications, discussing the pros and cons of each approach. We’ll start with Model-View-Controller and explain why it’s suboptimal. We’ll then move on to more appropriate architectures: Presentation-Abstraction-Control, Visual Proxy, and bifurcated objects.

HTML5 allows the creation of line of business applications which rely on the browser’s offline storage capabilities for application and data. These applications can provide user experiences comparable to native applications and allow large percentages of code and markup reuse between Desktop, Android, iOS and the most recent BlackBerry OSes (and Windows Phone 7 in November 2011). In this session, you will learn about the capabilities of HTML5 which pertain to these kinds of applications, about the frameworks which can help you create offline business applications and about the pitfalls and uncharted/semi-charted areas you will have to enter.

Sure, Ajax might not be the hardest thing you’ll have to do on your current project, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use a little help here and there. While there are a plethora of excellent choices in the Ajax library space, jQuery is fast becoming one of the most popular. In this talk, we’ll see why. In addition to its outstanding support for CSS selectors, dirt simple DOM manipulation, event handling and animations, jQuery also supports a rich ecosystem of plugins that provide an abundance of top notch widgets. Using various examples, this talk will help you understand what jQuery can do so you can see if it’s right for your next project.