When jQuery Attacks
Sep 27, 2011 · 2 minute read · CommentsprogrammingjQueryJavaScriptNodemeetupPittsburgh
It’s Tuesday night. After spending the day at work testing and debugging a new feature for a Java program of mine that parses and transforms data using ANTLR, what do I have to look forward to?
Apparently, the answer must be that I look forward to a hellish 30 minute drive at 6:30 PM in the opposite direction of home (which is only two miles away), taking a planned detour to avoid an insane I-579 construction-caused backup, then weaving through a horrible McKnightmare construction zone, in order to meet up with a handful of fellow JavaScript geeks, for another hour or so of more staring at computer code!
McKnight Road construction
The title “When jQuery attacks” is actually not mine, but stolen from the title of today’s session by Steven Brownlee, the gracious founder and host at Smith Micro of the Pittsburgh JavaScript meetup group.
Around eight or nine of us showed up tonight, and shared pizza Steve had ordered for us.
Steve briefly presented an overview of basic jQuery features, then we all just informally chatted about various topics that we brought up, from the coming impact of HTML5, the rise of JavaScript and its future, the decline of such technologies as Flash and JBoss, different JavaScript engines such as v8 and Rhino, client-side vs. server-side use of JavaScript (especially Node, which we have had meetups about already), and the controversy over Google’s Dart.
My own use of JavaScript
I have to confess that although I have used jQuery to prototype a web application I am developing, I have become uncomfortable with using just jQuery and adding layers on top of it using jQuery’s own bare-bones systems for templates and data binding to cleanly structure the application rather than have it be a horrible tangled-spaghetti mess of DOM hacking.
I am currently evaluating full-blown MVC types of frameworks such as Backbone and Sproutcore and Sencha Ext JS 4. Stay tuned for my investigations of all that on this blog sometime.