.delegate( ) - The appendTo Company Blog

Slides and More from appendTo’s European Trip to BlackBerry DevCon and jQuery U.K.

tdeedrick — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:34:41 +0000

As we mentioned in “appendTo Takes on Europe,” CEO Mike Hostetler traveled to Amsterdam to speak at BlackBerry DevCon Europe.

Thanks to Peter Peerdeman for sharing the image with us.

Mike’s slides for his presentation, Rapidly Develop Mobile Web Applications with jQuery Mobile, are now available. View slides.

“BlackBerry DevCon Europe was a fantastic event,” Mike said. “The energy and excitement around the BlackBerry platform was on a whole different level in Europe. I couldn’t help but get excited about what RIM is doing and is going to be doing from this event.”

From Amsterdam, Mike joined Ralph Whitbeck and Doug Neiner for jQuery UK in Oxford. The conference kicked off with this great video by White October, which put on a great conference:

Ralph’s and Doug’s slides are now available for their presentations but for a different take on their talks, check out these cool sketchnotes from visual artist Chris Shipton.

Chris’ take on Ralph: http://visualthinking.chrisshipton.com/recent-work/ralph-whitbeck-at-jquery-uk/

Chris’ take on other speakers including Doug: http://visualthinking.chrisshipton.com/misc-sketchnotes-from-jquery-uk/

Find the official presentation slides here.

Ralph’s slides on the State of jQuery

Doug’s slides on Contextual jQuery

It wasn’t all work and no play for the duo. Meet Sherlock Ralph and Dr. Doug Watson during their visit to Baker Street in London.

Now they’re back, solving jQuery crimes here on U.S. soil. But according to Doug, the conference was so well managed, successful and a joy to be a part of, that he hopes it turns into an annual event. Could Europe take another appendTo invasion?

Jonathan Sampson Joins appendTo

tdeedrick — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:40:04 +0000

Jonathan Sampson has joined the appendTo team as a Senior Developer. He’s spent the last 10 years in web development and feels passionately about both server-side development and front-end beauty. He’s also passionate about teaching and finds great satisfaction in knowing the next generation of developers will have an even higher set of shoulders to stand upon as they build the future.

Jonathan lives just outside Atlanta, GA with his wife and son (and dog, Mel). When he's not working he can be found gazing in awe through a telescope, reading a book, fumbling over a guitar or moderating on Stack Overflow. He’s also been known to put himself to sleep reading the jQuery production source, much to his wife’s amazement.

apppendTo is thrilled to welcome Jonathan to the team!

appendTo Takes on Europe

tdeedrick — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:20:47 +0000

Two conferences happening in February will feature appendTo speakers. First, on February 7-8, Mike Hostetler will speak at BlackBerry DevCon being held at the Amsterdam RAI Convention Centre. Mike’s session, “Rapidly Develop Mobile Web Applications With jQuery Mobile,” will offer an overview of jQuery Mobile and walk through the pros and cons of the project.

Session attendees can expect to:

Understand the aims, goals, strengths and weaknesses of the jQuery Mobile project to identify whether it is a fit for your project
Learn how to create a BlackBerry Tablet OS application using jQuery Mobile
Find out how to use other JavaScript libraries with jQuery Mobile

From BlackBerry DevCon, Mike will travel over to the U.K. for jQuery Europe, where he will be joined by two other appendTo employees and current jQuery board members, Doug Neiner and Ralph Whitbeck. For a not-to-be-missed preview of their trip, watch this short video:

appendTo will produce two all-day workshops on February 9, the day before the main event, covering jQuery Mobile and an Introduction to jQuery. The jQuery Mobile workshop—the public debut of appendTo’s jQuery Mobile Training Curriculum—provides a comprehensive review of the jQuery Mobile Framework, walking through its new features and functionalities available to build robust and cross-platform mobile sites. The introduction to jQuery will take students through the basics of jQuery front-end development and will give them a core foundation for developing with the most popular JavaScript library.

At the main conference, Ralph will present “The State of the jQuery Project.” Attendees will learn how the jQuery project is structured—from the jQuery Board to membership in the Software Freedom Conservancy—and the state of jQuery Core, jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile. The session also includes a glimpse of what might be coming in the near future. Doug will present “Contextual jQuery.” In his session, attendees will learn how to develop clean, responsible jQuery code that responds to its context instead of the traditional, define everything, top-down approach. This session will also cover how event delegation, traversal methods and advanced selectors all work together that allows for more efficient and less wasteful code.

The jQuery Europe event takes place on February 10 at the Siad Business School in Oxford. Visit the website for more information.

appendTo Welcomes Alex Robson

tdeedrick — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:59:44 +0000

Alex Robson has joined appendTo as a Senior Architect. Alex is an architect, developer and geek who enjoys working on distributed systems where scale and performance matter. He’s experienced in designing and implementing full stack web solutions using .NET, Erlang and Node.js. Alex loves open source and open standards and is always working to improve his abilities, expand his tool set and create simple solutions. Alex lives in Chattanooga, Tenn. appendTo is happy to welcome him to the team.

appendTo Welcomes Jim Cowart

tdeedrick — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 23:30:22 +0000

appendTo is happy to welcome Jim Cowart to the team as a Senior Architect. Jim made the leap from professional musician to writing software 11 years ago and hasn't looked back. With experience spanning front- to backend, using languages like C#, Erlang and JavaScript, Jim is passionate about development at any layer of the stack. Jim endeavors to combine his love for the web with his passion to see technology smartly applied to business needs. In his spare time Jim contributes to (and authors) several open-source projects, has been honored to present at DevLINK as well as the Nashville .NET user group, and blogs with a wonderful group of developers on FreshBrewedCode.com. Jim lives in Chattanooga, Tenn., with his wife, two sons and their cat.

jQuery Conference 2012: UK Conference Training Workshops to be Given by appendTo

rwhitbeck — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 16:07:05 +0000

We are very happy to announce two training workshops for the jQuery Conference 2012: United Kingdom. The trainings will be given by Doug Neiner, Ralph Whitbeck and Mike Hostetler of appendTo.

appendTo will be giving Introduction to jQuery and jQuery Mobile workshops. The workshops will be held on Thursday, 9 February, 2012 at the Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, UK.

Introduction to jQuery

jQuery has become the most popular JavaScript library for developers because of it's easy to learn and write. This course takes students through the basics of jQuery focused front-end development. This material is meant to establish a core foundation for developers. With a solid basis of jQuery and JavaScript understanding a developer will feel confident that they can add richness to their web applications.

jQuery Topics Covered*

Introduction
Find Something, Do Something
The jQuery Function
The jQuery Object
Events/Ajax/more...

* Topics subject to change

Price for the Introduction to jQuery workshop is £320 + VAT which includes a conference pass, £160 + VAT for just the training.

jQuery Mobile

jQuery mobile has gained undeniable press as a possible great solution to mobile web development. With a progressive enhancement approach jQuery mobile aims to allow a mobile web experience for all, while rewarding those with mobile devices capable of a rich experience.

This training will cover a comprehensive review of the jQuery Mobile Framework, walking through all of its new features and functionalities available to build robust and cross-platform mobile sites. The entire API will covered along with examples of how to use each component to its fullest potential.

The training concludes with a walk through of the construction of a jQuery Mobile application from scratch, all the way through to compiling a native version of the application with PhoneGap.

Topics Covered*

The state of the mobile web
jQuery Mobile Feature Overview
Building a jQuery Mobile application from scratch
Go native with jQuery Mobile + PhoneGap

* Topics subject to change

Price for the jQuery Mobile workshop is £420 + VAT which includes a conference pass, £270 + VAT for just the training.

For more information head over to the jQuery Conference Events site. Hope to see you there.

AmplifyJS 1.1 Executive Brief

rwhitbeck — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:58:40 +0000

Today, we are very happy to announce the release of AmplifyJS 1.1. This update comes with a couple of enhancements and bug fixes.

You can download the latest code bits here.

Here is a short summary of what's new in AmplifyJS 1.1.

FEATURE CHANGE: amplify.request

Requests made through amplify.request will always be resolved asynchronously, even if the resource invokes the callbacks immediately. This ensures that you will never have timing problems if the request definition is changed in the future.

ENHANCEMENT: amplify.request - added dataMap option

Data maps allow you to modify the data for an ajax request before the data is sent. You can use a hash to map keys or you can use a function for complete flexibility.

Using data maps

When searching Twitter, the key for the search phrase is q. If we want a more descriptive name, such as term, we can use a data map:

amplify.request.define( "twitter-search", "ajax", {
    url: "http://search.twitter.com/search.json",
    dataType: "jsonp",
    dataMap: {
        term: "q"
    }
});

amplify.request( "twitter-search", { term: "amplifyjs" }, ... );

Similarly, we can create a request that searches for mentions, by accepting a username:

amplify.request.define( "twitter-mentions", "ajax", {
    url: "http://search.twitter.com/search.json",
    dataType: "jsonp",
    dataMap: function( data ) {
        return {
            q: "@" + data.user
        };
    }
});

amplify.request( "twitter-mentions", { user: "amplifyjs" }, ... );

FIX: amplify.core

Fixed race condition when unsubscribing inside a handler #21 View ticket.

FIX: amplfiy.core

Fixed bug with subscribing a handler to multiple topics (#18) View ticket.

FIX: amplify.store

Fixed userData detection in IE when userData is disabled #31/#17 View ticket.

FIX: amplify.store

Fixed expiration for in-memory storage (#23) View ticket.

Ralph Whitbeck Joins appendTo

rwhitbeck — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:13:37 +0000

We at appendTo are very happy to announce that Ralph Whitbeck has join our team. Ralph brings 15 years of experience and will use that at appendTo for front-end development, project management, training, and evangelism.

Ralph comes to us from Brandlogic Corporation and brings with him over 12 years of experience working with clients large and small. Ralph speaks fairly regularly at jQuery Conferences and other events. You can find out more about his upcoming talks on lanyrd.

Ralph is also a jQuery Board Member having worked on the jQuery team now since October 2009. He started the Official jQuery Podcast with Elijah Manor in 2009 and is now co-hosting the show with Rey Bango. You can listen to his show at http://podcast.jquery.com.

Ralph is also a co-author for O’Reilly’s jQuery Cookbook. He’s currently working on another book for O’Reilly for release soon.

We are very excited to have Ralph come on board. Please follow Ralph on twitter.

AmplifyJS’s Growing and Supportive Community

rwhitbeck — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:56:59 +0000

It has been a busy several months since the release of AmplifyJS 1.0.0 on June 14, 2011. We are pleased to hear many of you starting to use the library in your applications.

We are continuing to work on the feature set for the release of AmplifyJS 1.1.0 and as we do so we’ve seen numerous presentations and contributions being made from the community that we’d like to share.

Presentations

We are encouraged that numerous talks across the world are starting to list AmplifyJS as a tool to help build modern web applications. The following are some of the talks we are aware of.

Aaron Powell gave nice overview of the various client-side frameworks available today in his TechEd AU talk entitled Chasing the Evolving Web. You can view the video from his talk on the Tech Ed website.
Jim Cowart and Alex Robson gave a great presentation at devLINK entitled Client Focused Web Stacks – Alternatives To Server Side Patterns. You can grab their slides and code from their GitHub account. Jim and Alex have used all 3 components of AmplifyJS alongside other client-side libraries such as KnockoutJS and Postal.js.
Todd Anglin also presented at the devLINK conference and shared what HTML5 and CSS3 Techniques You Can Use Today . Todd mentioned the AmplifyJS Store component as a component to abstract all the cross-browser concerns when dealing with persistent client storage.
Elijah Manor spoke on Extending Your jQuery Web Application with AmplifyJS at both devLINK and jQuery Conference Boston. During his talk he took a simple web application and slowly added the 3 components of AmplifyJS.

If you’ve given a talk or you’ve heard a talk that has mentioned AmplifyJS that isn’t listed above we’d love to hear about it! Not only are we interested, but we want to publicly thank those that are promoting this library!

Extensions

In addition to presentations, the AmplifyJS library has found it’s way into many of the mainstream projects as a bundled extension. Some of these include…

If you know of any other AmplifyJS extensions or if you’d like to help make it available please let us know.

Patches

A great sign that a project is healthy is if there are outside contributions. In addition to the contributions we saw before we launched the 1.0.0 release, we have also seen the following step forward and help AmplifyJS to be a better library.

Adrien Lavoillotte from Paris, France submitted two pull requests, a patch and a new feature!
Alexander Zeitler from Karlsruhe, Germany submitted a pull request to update the Visual Studio Intellisense VSDOC for the amplify.store component.

Thanks again Adrien and Alexander. We hope that you’ll continue to make AmplifyJS better and we encourage others to contribute as well.

jQuery Conference Slides Now Available for appendTo Talks

rwhitbeck — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 03:44:00 +0000

The jQuery Conference Boston 2011 was held at the Royal Sonesta in Boston, MA on October 1-2, 2011. As we mentioned before a few appendTo employees gave presentations. Their slides are now available:

Elijah Manor, “Extending your jQuery App with AmplifyJS”, View Slides
Scott González, “Breaking Changes + Happy Users = Mythical Software?”, View Slides
Doug Neiner, “Contextual jQuery in Practice”, View Slides

You can see the rest of the slides that are available from the conference on the jQuery Conference Schedule.

Did you attend jQuery Conference in Boston this year? We’d love to hear your feedback on these talks.

.delegate( ) - The appendTo Company Blog

Slides and More from appendTo’s European Trip to BlackBerry DevCon and jQuery U.K.

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