Kings of Code 2009, day 1

Kings of Code day one is over. The weather is per­fect, Tuschin­ski the­atre is charm­ing and todays side-events were a great warm-up for tomor­rows con­fer­ence day. The sem­i­nars may not have been extremely advanced but they were nice intro­duc­tions to some really inter­est­ing top­ics that I’ve been want­ing to learn more about.

Advanced jQuery tech­niques
The day started off with a few advanced jQuery tech­niques with speaker Edwin Mar­tin. While I don’t per­son­ally con­sider them really advanced, the tech­niques still had some nice points we could learn from.

For exam­ple, I hadn’t heard of the live() event binder which solves the prob­lem of hav­ing to rebind onclick events when adding ele­ments dynam­i­cally, which will come in handy in almost every project. Edwin also gave a nice intro­duc­tion to cre­at­ing cus­tom eas­ing animations.

One thing that impressed me was jQuery’s RSS parser. With jut a few lines of code, you can make an AJAX call to get an RSS feed and con­ve­niently tra­verse and out­put it in the browser by using Javascript only. Didn’t know that.

Nei­ther did I know how fast and easy it can be to cre­ate a cus­tom themed dynamic inter­face with jQuery UI and The­meRoller (though I may have sus­pected it.)

<can­vas>
The sem­i­nar of the can­vas ele­ment by Mar­cel Beumer was some­thing I had looked for­ward to. I find the idea of ren­der­ing 2D with HTML5 and Javascript to be fas­ci­nat­ing. While the sem­i­nar itself was great and infor­ma­tive, it gave me the feel­ing that it may still be a bet­ter idea to learn Flash and AS3, rather than start play­ing with canvas.

Mar­cel pointed out that the advan­tages with HTML5’s can­vas ele­ment is that it’s an open stan­dard that is sup­ported by the browser rather than depen­dent on a plu­gin, and that you will use the same toolset—HTML and Javascript—as you are used to. I com­pletely agree and it’s a beau­ti­ful idea which seems to already be very capable.

How­ever, it may take a very long time until it becomes a stan­dard and even longer until it’s sup­ported by all major browsers. Flash is already an extremely pow­er­ful plat­form that is being con­stantly improved and updated. It may be a browser plu­gin (and as such, an addi­tional down­load) but it’ll take a long time before more peo­ple will have a browser sup­port­ing <can­vas> than a browser with Flash.

Of course, there’s always emu­la­tion lay­ers and sim­i­lar but they are, and will be, much slower. And talk­ing about speed, I’ve got a strong feel­ing that Flash will be way more opti­mized as it can already ren­der 3D at stun­ning frame-rates. I saw amaz­ing exam­ples of this at FITC ear­lier this year.

The can­vas ele­ment is a nice tool and I will love to see it become an open stan­dard. Hope­fully I’ll find some­where to put it to good use but for now, I’m a bit skep­tic and still find Flash to be more mature, proven and opti­mized for the pur­pose of ren­der­ing heav­ier graph­ics. As the tech­nol­ogy matures, I hope we’ll see an increas­ingly pow­er­ful and fast HTML5 with great frameworks/ abstrac­tion lay­ers for all sorts of rendering.

Link rec­om­men­da­tion from the seminar:

Bespin – Web code edi­tor built using HTML5 tech­nol­ogy
https://bespin.mozilla.com/

Intro­duc­tion to Rails
It’s funny how the sem­i­nar I sus­pected would be least inter­est­ing turned out to be the one I enjoyed most. Before this, I’ve never looked at either Ruby or Rails. Since I’m used to PHP, I sim­ply assumed it would be some­what bor­ing, hyped and unnec­es­sary. I’m glad to say I was wrong.

Dur­ing the one hour long sem­i­nar, Menno van der Sman and Justin Hal­sall intro­duced us to Rails by build­ing a data­base dri­ven location-based search engine. I have to say, Rails really impressed me and I’m going to another sem­i­nar about it tomor­row. It looked and felt really com­fort­able, quick and con­ve­nient. These guys made me want to learn more and I’ll prob­a­bly even put it to prac­tice in an upcom­ing project.

Sub­ver­sion & Ver­sions App
In the after­noon, Jasper Hauser and Jonathan Dann from Sofa gave an intro­duc­tion to sub­ver­sion and their own Mac client, Ver­sions. Since I’m actu­ally using this appli­ca­tion daily, there wasn’t a whole lot of new infor­ma­tion for me to pick up. How­ever, it’s always fun to hear things from other people’s per­spec­tive, espe­cially those who devel­oped the appli­ca­tion I’m using. Besides, I really like Sofa.

All in all, it was a good and enjoy­able pre­sen­ta­tion. Among other things, they rec­om­mended Google Code as a sub­ver­sion repos­i­tory and I noticed them using a very nice snip­pet app called Tex­tEx­pander which I will def­i­nitely take a look at.

iPhone app devel­op­ment
Last but not least came an excel­lent end of an excit­ing first day Since I’m an iPhone owner and a huge fan, I of course looked for­ward to this sem­i­nar. Joris Ver­bogt, cre­ator of the Dutch TXXI app (of which the owner is actu­ally a friend of mine) gave us a quick walk­through on how to cre­ate a native iPhone appli­ca­tion using Objective-C in Xcode and Inter­face Builder.

The syn­tax of Objective-C may seem a bit odd at first but it shouldn’t take long to get used to it if you’ve ever writ­ten C or C++. Using the sup­plied iPhone sim­u­la­tor and Inter­face Builder, Joris showed us how to quickly build a Twit­ter feed inter­face and con­ve­niently see it in action right there on his Mac. Plenty of fun!

All I can really say after this on hour sem­i­nar is that Apple seem to have made it a joy to develop for this plat­form and I’d love to try it out.

End of the day
My first day of my first visit at Kings of Code turned out to be warm, excit­ing and very edu­ca­tional. The atmos­phere is great, the sub­jects are awe­some and at the end of the day, both my col­league and I are sat­is­fied and even more excited about tomorrow.

See you there!

Note: Rapid blog­ging, the clock is ticking—beware of typos.

• Day 13: Safari 5 First Impressions
• Novem­ber 20, 2009
• Day 25: Speeches Are Hot
• Day 15: Web Design Best Practices
• Port­fo­lio