jQuery UI talks at the Bay Area jQuery Conference

Posted on by

Next weekend is the San Francisco Bay Area jQuery Conference that will be held at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus Conference Center in Mountain View, California.  There are still a few tickets remaining and tickets can be purchased up until Sunday April 18th.

In addition to the great talks that will be given on jQuery core there are quite a few talks about jQuery UI.  Here are the details on those talks:

jQuery UI Fundamentals

Richard D. WorthRichard D. Worth
Saturday 4:30p.m., Room 2

Widgets done richly. These tools work the way jQuery does, helping you build a rich user interface with ease.

jQuery UI, built on top of jQuery, is a complete set of interactions and widgets for building Rich Internet Applications. A few examples include drag-and-drop, resizing, mouse-sorting, mouse-selecting, autocomplete, button, datepicker, dialog, progressbar, slider, and tabs.

Each component adheres to a consistent standard across API, design, behavior and theming. This minimizes the surprise and makes learning all of them as easy as learning one.

This talk covers how jQuery UI is designed and how it leverages the power, flexibility, and expressiveness of the jQuery API. A live demonstration shows you how to use some of the more common jQuery UI interactions and widgets.

As an intro, this talk will be a great base for later jQuery UI talks that deal with creating or extending jQuery UI widgets and jQuery UI theming.

jQuery UI Widget Factory

Adam J. SontagAdam J. Sontag
Sunday 11a.m., Room 2

Charlie and the Widget Factory

All the delicious widgets in jQuery UI are have a sweet, creamy center: The jQuery UI Widget Factory. By encapsulating a useful infrastructure for creating complex jQuery plugins into a base class, the widget factory can be your golden ticket to creating complex (or not-that-complex), reusable components for your web app/site.

We’ll begin by exploring some common approaches to developing jQuery plugins, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of various patterns, and identifying the shared characteristics involved in setting up robust, stateful widgets. Then, I’ll reveal the awesome secret that’s at the heart of the whole presentation: The authors of jQuery UI have already done just that, and their work is your gain. Armed with that tasty morsel, we’ll conceive, gestate, and give birth to a widget in almost no time flat.

By the time our tour concludes, you’ll have an understanding of when the widget factory is an appropriate solution to your problem, its potential drawbacks, and how to use it to create plugins that are lean, limber, and logical. If, of course, you are wise and listen to me, like the Oompa Loompa Doompety Dee.

Inside ThemeRoller 2.0: Refactoring for Speed

Doug NeinerDoug Neiner
Sunday 1:15p.m., Room 1

Doug has been working on the new version of ThemeRoller for the jQuery UI site. In his talk, Doug aims to give you a peak of the code and show off some of the speed improvements that are being made. The new version of ThemeRoller is being built on top of the latest technologies like Canvas and HTML5. You will see how you can use client side technologies to reduce server load and maximize the speed of your app.

Advanced Uses of jQuery UI

Scott GonzálezScott González
Sunday 2:45p.m., Room 1

jQuery UI provides a suite of plugins that can be used to build Rich Internet Applications. However, just like jQuery, it can’t do everything you need right out of the box. In this session we’ll cover how to extend jQuery UI plugins and how to build new plugins on top of what jQuery UI provides.

Jumping into the jQuery Community

Ralph WhitbeckRalph Whitbeck
Sunday 3:30p.m., Room 2

Are you looking to get more involved with the jQuery project but don’t know what you can do to help? Do you want to make a difference and be recognized for your contributions to jQuery? Even if you don’t have the JavaScript chops to add dazzling new features to the jQuery core, there are still plenty of direct ways for you to contribute back to the community.

In this talk, we’ll explore various options available to both designers and developers for contributing back to the jQuery Community. We’ll discuss ways to have a big impact on a great number of people—from offering help on the forum to sharing plugins to writing tutorials. And we’ll look at the proper procedures for reporting bugs and submitting patches.

This talk is meant for anyone who is interested in jQuery, from the very beginner to the more advanced user who is looking to get more involved.