KNP Labs went to DotJs

This year we had the pleasure to go to DotJs, the biggest javascript conference in Europe. Hundreds of developers meet at “Le théâtre de Paris” to learn more about the future of javascript and experimental APIs.

So, for those who couldn’t make it, here is a small summary of what you missed. We were surrounded by javascript stars as Addy Osmani, creator of Yeoman, Pamela Fox, creator of Khan Academy, Alex Sexton, creator of yepnope.js, Dave Methvin representing Jquery Core Team, Brendan Eich, inventor of Javascript and CTO of Mozilla, and many other interesting people.

Addy Osmani started the conference by talking about Polymer. Web has evolved a lot in the past years and html is no longer what it used to be. Components we use everyday like carousel, tabs, etc. have grown on complexity. Most of them are constructed on javascript and the html generated ends up being a mess. With Polymer, markup can be meaningful again. Polymer components create custom html elements, extend existing DOM objects and are inserted on DOM only when needed. Components will be re-usable and html readable. If you've worked with Angular, this is a lot like angular's directives.

Another interesting talk was Remy's Sharp talk about Iframes. Wait..what? Iframes? Really? Haven't we developers tried to avoid them for years and now someone is saying that they are useful? At first this really surprised me. But the talk was very informative on how to use them to prevent clickjacking and how to achieve cross-domain. For this last one checkout Porthole.

Guillermo Rauch, talked about the importance of speed. More precisely about front-end optimization on single page apps and how success is tidily linked with performance and accessibility. This is all about the illusion of speed and how users must not feel like they are waiting. For example when an app is launched an image is rendered before anything else, this way the user doesn't see a white page. He finally presented MyDB, a technology that allows front-end to react in real time and have the same output from different platforms at the same time. (slides)

Pamela Fox presented «making js easier to learn». She works at Khan Academy and explained how it is to teach programming online. She also talked about the importance of using tools to write good clean working code, as jshint.

To close this day on a high note, we had Brendan Eich. He talked about how internet has evolved in our world and how it is present more and more in our lives. We must build a better internet where users have the control, privacy and choices they want: “empower web users”. Expect progress and innovation to have a better performance in every platform.(slides)

There were other entertaining talks about type dependance by John K Paul (slides), Module Frontiers by James Burke (slides), web performance by Dave Methvin, web security by Alex Sexton (slides) and dart.js by Nicolas Geoffray, which is a google language that compiles to javascript but is used to replace javascript.

Do not hesitate going next year, I assure you you won't regret it. Not only it's inspiring, but it's also a nice way to meet people and to interact and exchange about something that we are passionate about. And how amazing is it to see the people who create our everyday tooling?