Full Frontal 2009
22 November 2009
Full Frontal 2009, a one day JavaScript conference, wrapped up yesterday in Brighton.
A few highlights, in no particular order.
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PPK gave an run down of the state of mobile browser and the difficulties of cross-device rendering (if you thought browser testing on the desktop was difficult…). Mobile web has been the next big thing for what feels like an age, but the browsers are now sufficiently advanced that real, useful mobile apps are possible. The W3C Widget spec looks like a decent attempt at standardising how they are built.
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ARIA is here, and ready to be used today. Todd Kloots ran through a very impressive demo of the how and why of building it into your web app. He made an excellent point about keyboard accessibility being part of a mature, well written web interface. The techniques he uses for building this looked really well thought out.
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Jake Archibald delivered an energetic summary of his findings on JavaScript performance. He had some great tips: the most important was that you should do your own investigations into performance (and then publish your results).
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Simon Willison finished up the day with a last minute change of topic. I’m thankful he did, and found it the most through provoking session of the day. He did a live demo of a Comet messaging server running on node.js, a server side environment for building HTTP servers. node.js looks like a lot of fun.
Despite being a new conference the all the sessions were excellent. Ajaxian has a great set of posts covering most of the talks in greater detail.