Sessions at YUIConf 2011 about JavaScript on Thursday 3rd November

Web sites and applications these days demand more than your grandmother's good old-fashioned pseudo-classical extend() model for JavaScript class relationships. This talk will outline the suite of APIs and infrastructure options available to you in YUI to assemble and augment classes and class instances. We'll review what you can do, common patterns of use, and most importantly, why you would use one method over another.

Intended audience: Intermediate Users.

Loader is at the core of every YUI application and pattern. It is one of two parts of YUI that if you were to remove it, what you'd have would no longer be YUI. And yet, it is one of the less understood components within the library. In this talk, I'll be covering in depth how to configure Loader using its more advanced options, from module groups to conditional loading.

Intended audience: Intermediate Users.

This talk will take the Y! Messenger Chrome extension as an example to demonstrate how to build a Chrome extension using YUI. It will share tips on how to create a Messenger client using web technologies and the Messenger IM SDK. The talk will also introduce how I optimized the extension's performance using a virtual scrolling list.

Intended audience: Web developers, Chrome extension developers.

For its dev team, the NFL season is a breakneck-paced stream of new features, last-minute sponsorships and custom UIs. Developer Ryan Cannon describes the NFL's transition from Prototype to YUI, and demonstrates how YUI's JavaScript infrastructure has improved site performance, reduced development time and improved collaboration.

Intended audience: Front-end developers on medium-to-large sites.

Every company wants to build a great mobile web app, but what about the company that wants to build a hundred of them? When striving to meet the intense needs of a fortune 500 company, no other framework scales like YUI3. We'll walk you through the life of a mobile developer in a big company, and consider some of the issue you would face in today's ever changing environment. Technical topics include: building corporate cogs with widget, 1 ScrollView and 1000 phones, simpleYUI for the masses, mitigating risks while exploring HTML5.

Intended audience: Front-end developers writing mobile applications that need to support a verity of devices. This session is especially applicable to those developers looking to meet the needs of corporate customers.

An overview of some of the ways you can use tools like Ant to automate the grunt work of making your site as fast as possible.

Intended audience: Newer developers who may not be as performance-conscious; people who hate doing manual optimization work.

Architecting and building a module from scratch. Lessons in careful planning, optimizaton and feature-setting that go into module design.

Will demonstrate techniques, strategies, and patterns for writing testable (specifically unit-testable) YUI-based Javascript. We have learned a lot of lessons rewriting Y! Mail from the ground-up — especially unit tests & automation. I will share these lessons & provide specific tips/patterns for writing unit testable YUI code, also applicable to non-YUI code.

Intended audience: JS devs

The Dial widget is a circular value input control. It's like a real-world, analog volume control dial, but with much finer UI control. Have you ever needed a slider with a 2000 unit range, wanted 1 unit accuracy, but didn't have 2000 pixels of real estate for a slider? The Dial widget is made for cases like this.

What you'll learn from this talk:

1. Compare and contrast the Dial control features to other UI input controls such as sliders, spinners.

2. See compelling (and visually tasty) examples of Dial solutions to UI challenges.

3. How to implement one in your code.

4. Explore the Dial attributes.

Computer programs are the most complicated things that humans make. They must be perfect, which is hard for us because we are not perfect. Programming is thought to be a "head" activity, but there is a lot of "gut" involved. Indeed, it may be the gut that gives us the insight necessary for solving hard problems. But gut messes us up when it come to matters of style.

The systems in our brains that make us vulnerable to advertising and propaganda also influence our programming styles. This talk looks systematically at the development of a programming style that specifically improves the reliability of programs. The examples are given in JavaScript, a language with an uncommonly large number of bad parts, but the principles are applicable to all languages.

Dinner will be served from 5:30-6:30pm.