Development

Steve Souders can make your web site even faster; Max Wheeler says it’s all about location, location, geolo­cation; Ben Schwarz is building a better web with HTML5; Paul Hagon can enrich your large data set; Silvia Pfeiffer knows her way around HTML5 audio and video; Dmitry Bara­novskiy opens up web vector graphics with Raphaël; Patrick Lee intro­duces us to server-​​side JavaScript and Myles Eftos knows how to build mobile web apps.

Location, location, geolocation

Presenter: Max Wheeler

Phones with GPS are now widely available and the growing support for the JavaScript geolo­cation API means location based services aren’t restricted to the realm of native appli­ca­tions. Now is the time to learn how to take advantage of this infor­mation and add provide your users with the best personal and contextual expe­rience.

This session will take you through building a location-​​based mobile app using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Including cross-​​platform tech­niques for figuring out where your users are, and providing graceful fall­backs options for devices that don’t have geolo­cation support (or users that don’t want to tell you exactly). You’ll learn about geocoding to a physical address (and the other way around) and look at how to build a mobile-​​friendly map with local points of interest.

Enriching large data sets

The ins and outs of APIs and RDFa

Presenter: Paul Hagon

Libraries contain masses of beau­ti­fully struc­tured data collected over many years. But these records may have their flaws and might now want to be used in ways, such as location based services, that weren’t imagined 30 years ago. How can we use existing API’s and web services to enrich this data to enable it to be used in a variety of ways. This data also needs to be exposed for others to use and build upon. With the recent release of the Government response to the Web 2.0 task­force, how can insti­tu­tions comply with these recom­men­da­tions by providing their data in usable forms for the public. What’s involved in building an API into our resources and how can our data be given more meaning through semantic linkages like RDFa?

Building a better web with HTML5

Presenter: Ben Schwarz

Devices have caught up; That is, our tech­nology dreams from the mid 90’s have finally been realised. However since this time, HTML has lay dormant. We’ve been through a decade of tech wasteland. It’s time to change the status quo and take back the web.

During my session we’ll look at where the future of HTML lies, including new struc­tural elements. You’ll also grasp an intro­duction to asso­ciated tech­nologies that have come into popu­larity with the steam of HTML5: SVG, Web Sockets, Web Workers, Geo-​​location and making appli­ca­tions useful offline.

JavaScript Sprachraum

Delve deep into JavaScript

Presenter: Patrick Lee

Despite being an option on web servers as early as 1995 with Netscape’s LiveWire, JavaScript has long been regarded as a language only of the browser.

Approaching sweet sixteen JavaScript has evolved in the community and gained accep­tance as a general purpose programming language.

In this session Patrick will be looking at JavaScript outside of the browser, focusing on how to use it for web server appli­ca­tions. Starting with the old in Helma and progressing through various usages to the most new and exciting with node.js, Patrick will talk about why JavaScript on the server matters right now and show you how to get started using it.

Raphaël: native web vector graphics library

This JavaScript library will simplify your work with vector graphics on the web

Presenter: Dmitry Baranovskiy

As SVG and Canvas come of age, every developer who loves stan­dards is wanting to use them in production to make eye-​​popping effects. But then they come up against the inevitable lack of support in IE6 to 8, and promptly give up the ghost.

Fear not! Raphaël provides a developer friendly API to create graphics that work in Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+. Yes, you read that correctly, IE6.

In this session Dmitry Bara­novskiy, Raphaël’s creator will walk you through its possi­bil­ities and will open up new horizons for web graphics that will work in all almost every browser.

Building mobile web apps

Making real apps for the iPhone, iPad and Android using web tech­nologies

Presenter: Myles Eftos

There is no denying that the Apple App Store is huge, but who wants to have to deal with Objective-​​C? Thank­fully, tech­nologies like PhoneGap and Sencha allow web devel­opers to work in languages they know (HTML/​CSS/​JavaScript) while still making them look native. PhoneGap also allows us to port our apps to other plat­forms, like Android.

This session will look at the mobile web devel­opment life­cycle from building a prototype in the browser, inte­gration with the phone, app submission and some basic marketing tricks.

HTML5 Audio and Video

Using these exciting new elements in practice

Presenter: Silvia Pfeiffer

With three different audio and video codec formats each supported by the diverse HTML5 capable Web browsers, plus the need to deal with fallback for older browsers, HTML5 media is not the simple solution we have all been hoping for. But on the other hand, HTML5 media will make your life easier, since it offers some features that are hard to get with tradi­tional Adobe Flash, such as a stan­dardised JavaScript API, inte­grated CSS support, and built-​​in support for acces­si­bility and inter­na­tion­al­i­sation through captioning, subti­tling, and audio descrip­tions. Addi­tionally, devices such as the iPhone and iPad will only support HTML5 media and not Flash. So for any serious prac­ti­tioner it’s a tech­nology you can no longer ignore. W3C invited expert Silvia Pfeiffer will talk through the big issues on this important topic.

Even Faster Web Sites

Presenter: Steve Souders

Web 2.0 is adding more and more content to our pages, espe­cially features that are imple­mented in Ajax. But our web appli­ca­tions are evolving faster than the browsers that they run in. We don’t have to rely on or wait for the release of new browsers to make our web appli­ca­tions faster. In this session, Steve Souders discusses web perfor­mance best prac­tices from his second book, Even Faster Web Sites. These time-​​saving tech­niques are used by the world’s most popular web sites to create a faster user expe­rience, increase revenue, and reduce oper­ating costs. Steve provides tech­nical details about reducing the pain of JavaScript, as well as secrets for making your page load faster in emerging markets where network connec­tivity is a chal­lenge.