Sessions at Wakanday 2011 with link on Saturday 15th October

JavaScript has unexpectedly become one of the most important programming languages of the 21st century. Douglas’s talk will outline where JavaScript came from, what it is doing here, and how to use it well.

CommonJS is a community-driven effort by volunteers with diverse backgrounds and interests to converge on a minimal common ground that is sound and scalable. The goal is to make writing portable JavaScript applications that run on servers, browsers, desktop applications, and secure sandboxes not only possible, but also accessible to developers and development tools without vendor lock-in or steep learning curves.

Christoph will attempt to paint us a picture of where CommonJS is today and where it is headed. CommonJS is well on its way to realizing the dream of portable JavaScript applications composed of libraries from all over the Internet. That is, modular JavaScript that runs everywhere.

NoFlo is a JavaScript implementation of Flow-Based Programming, a way
of separating the control flow of software from the actual software
logic. It helps organizing large applications, and especially in
importing and modifying large data sets.

FBP itself is not a new idea, coming from 70s IBM concepts of more
manageable business workflows, but NoFlo refreshes these concepts and
brings them to Node.js applications.

The MIT-licensed NoFlo library can either be used to run full
flow-based applications, or as a library for making complex workflows
or asynchronous processes manageable.

This session will introduce Flow-Based Programming to the audience,
and show how NoFlo can be used for large-scale data processing. It
will also contain a bit on the lighter side of NoFlo: how to simplify
user interactions through it.

Wakanda may provide an all-in-one solution, but it’s far from being a monolithic platform! Sure, you get a development studio, an Ajax framework, an HTTP Server, an application engine, and a database, but it can very easily interact with your existing tools, frameworks, and libraries. Learn how, as a developer, you’ll be able to share your own widgets, modules, services, and plugins between your applications and externally with any compatible development community. Find out about the power of system workers and Wakanda’s datastore HTTP API to bring your own JavaScript tools to Wakanda Studio.

As we all know, HTML5 is blurring the distinction between native apps and web apps. Aiding this evolution is an explosion of frameworks and toolsets to help to build these cross-platform, next generation applications. In this presentation, Jesse will describe the current landscape of both UI frameworks: Sencha Touch, jQuery Mobile, jQTouch, jo, zepto, and native containers PhoneGap, Appcelerator, and Brightcove App Cloud.
Jesse’s presentation will then dive deep into building a very minimal app on top of both PhoneGap and Brightcove App Cloud.