Highlights from The Ajax Experience

I'll kick things off by discussing some of the awesome-cool things I saw at The Ajax Experience, a JavaScript-centric conference put on by the guys at Ajaxian.com.  This was my first year to attend, and it was great to see so much enthusiasm for a language that is gaining more legitimacy by the day. 

The transition of JavaScript from a poorly regarded cut-and-paste tool for weenies who couldn't write a Java applet to a dare-I-say "academic" language has been fascinating to observe.  Developers were once wary of including it on a resume, but now in some fields it's the most important qualifier.  In 1999, who would have thought there would be a popular conference solely for JavaScript-related technologies?  If you're raising your hand right now, your last name is either Crockford or you're probably giving yourself too much credit.

A few high-level tidbits from the conference:

• John Resig, the benevolent deity of jQuery and many other open-source JavaScript projects touched on his new endeavour named Sizzle.  It's a blazing-fast standalone CSS selector framework that aims to be used not only in jQuery but other frameworks as well.  CSS selectors are great, but sometimes unusable due to the negative performance impact (IE6, I'm looking at you).  Speeding up CSS selectors even the tiniest bit gives developers a chance to use complex selectors that were previously too slow.

• smushit.com - Representatives from smushit.com, a fancy web 2.0 image optimizer, outlined some best practices for high-quality, low file-size images.  They recommended 8-bit PNGs, no GIFS, and JPEGs stripped of all meta data.  Smushit.com is so excited about this that they wrote an application to do all of the optimization for you.  No more command+alt+shift+s+*confusion over the plethora of save-as-copy encoding options in Photoshop*.

• Netflix Has a New API - Bill Scott spoke briefly about Netflix's new REST-based API.  Before the new API was unrolled, Netflix held a "hack day" in which Netflix engineers had to consume their new API in a creative way.  I thought this was a great concept; contrary to popular belief, engineers can be quite creative when given the proper tools and time.  It reminded me of finger-painting day in Kindergarten.

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