Ajax Experience 2009 … Day 2

On day 2 of the Ajax Experience it started out with a presentation on ECMAScript Harmony and the Future of JavaScript. This presentation went into a lot of detail on the new standards in JavaScript. However, it didn’t cover the newer features.

I also attended a presentation on Web Compatibility and Performance Testing given by Imad Mouline and Ryan Breen of Gomez Inc. This was a good presentation on evaluating browser speeds. Not surprised to see that Google Chrome and Apple Safari showed the fastest browser times and that IE and Firefox were the slowest. This session also covered topics such as time to first byte and domain sharding.

Just after lunch I hit the vendor session IE8 given by Chris Bowen. This was a quick session by nature (all the vendor tech sessions were only a half hour). Chirs did a good job of showing the new developer tools in IE8. Two things I was glad to see is that the developer tools are finally on par with those offered by Firebug and that IE8 can emulate IE7.

The highlight on the second day for my money was Object Oriented CSS given by Nicole Sullivan.  The presentation offered a shift away from how I normally think of CSS (styling by element) to focusing on styling by class. The benfit being smaller more managable CSS files and fewer defined styles.

• Avoid Styling by location.
• Define defaults.
• If two styles are so close (aka heading 3 and heading 4 should have more of a difference then 1 pixel) then throw one out and only use one.
• When adding classes to a style you may not know what one will take precedence.
• Slideshow

The final presentation of the day that I attended was on JavaScript patterns given by Stoyan Stefanov. This presentation quickly covered JavaScript patterns and anti-patterns. His website pretty much summed up his presentation. Also, here is the slideshow.