Nomad

15 Dec 2011 by Stoo

Full Frontal 2011

There was a contest after Full Frontal to write a blog post about the conference and be in with a chance to win a couple of tickets for next year's event. The deadline was the end of November so I may have missed that… Full Frontal had an interesting line up and venue – the ever good Duke of Yorks cinema in Brighton who provided free coffee and pastry treats throughout the day. Fruit was provided by Prem at Dharma Fly which is a nice touch for a conference of geeks. Prem also hosts the fortnightly AsyncJS meet up, which is worth checking out if you're ever in Brighton.

I'm not going to go into too much detail about every talk, there is a speaker line up and schedule available which outlines the talks, so I'll just go over the highlights for me.

CoffeeScript Design Decisions

by Jeremy Ashkenas

CoffeeScript is a language which can be "compiled" to JavaScript and is intended to hide JavaScript's warts. I've been aware of the language for some time but have never experimented with it as it seems like a bit of a novelty. I already know JavaScript, so why would I learn another language to write JavaScript for me?

Jeremy's talk really opened my eyes to what the language has to offer. It's heavily Ruby influenced with the same "everything is an expression" philosophy, meaning what would be a statement in most languages (e.g. if/else try/catch etc) would be an expression which returns a value in CoffeeScript. There are some very nice features, such as list comprehensions and splats, which would save a tonne of typing. Unfortunately, while I feel I now "get" CoffeeScript, I still don't think I'd use it. What I'd love to see is CoffeeScript used as an independent scripting language outside the browser à la Perl or Python.

Web Based Code Editors

There were two talks in this series, the first by Marijn Haverbeke who built CodeMirror, the second by Rik Arends the CTO of Cloud9 IDE.

Marijn talked about the technical difficulties of implementing a code editor in HTML and JavaScript and his various attempts moving from an IFRAME with designMode = "On" to the contentEditable attribute to finally faking it by building his own caret and text insertion methods. The talk went in to a lot of detail concerning the pitfalls and performance issues involved with creating this kind of system. I would honestly rather see something like CodeMirror built into a CMS than TinyMCE at the moment.

Rik showed us a demo of the recently released Cloud9 IDE. This is something else I've come across recently, but haven't really had a chance to delve too deeply into. As web developers we're pushing more and more types of software online in some form or another. Except for IDE's. We tell people the web / cloud (if you prefer) is the place that all software should live but we don't practice what we preach. Cloud9 are changing that! The editor itself looks pretty sweet plus they're now adding in git and github integration to complete the service.

Beyond the Page

by Glenn Jones

Glenn Jones is a developer based in Brighton and founder of Madgex, a provider of job boards. He showed us a combination of browser innovation and semantic web niceties with web intents included. He showed us a couple of demos, including dragging semantically marked up contact info between Chrome and Firefox. When the data packet lands on the second browser it automatically parsed the content and searched for related info about that contact. Very impressive and well worth checking out his Ident Engine.

All in all Full Frontal was a fantastic day.