jQuery Conference 2009 - Summary

I recently spoke at jQuery Conference 2009 in Boston on September 12, 2009.  I gave the Beginning jQuery talk to an overflowing room of about 120 people.  The highlight of my talk was letting two high school students Jamie Gillar and John Cicolella come on stage with me and demonstrate their school project, which they built using jQuery and jQuery UI plugins.

I got some really great feedback from my talk and am using some of the more constructive feedback as a little of what not to do next time.   I think less slides and more code is the key.  I walked the audience through my code example of pulling twitter into your web page using jQuery and JSON based on a previous blog post.

You can see my slides on slideshare:

It was an exhausting week but it was the most fun I’ve had in quite some time.  The first two days, Thursday and Friday, were designated jQuery Development Days in which we held meetings to discuss many topics that involved the jQuery project.

Topics like:

• The Plugin Respository
• jQuery UI Project
• The Software Freedom Conservancy
• How to spend donations (hint: more conferences)

That was followed by two days of the conference which were jammed packed with talks and networking.  In addition to all the great jQuery team members I meet like Richard D. Worth, Brandon Aaron, Jörn Zaefferer, Scott González, Rey Bango, Karl Swedberg to name just a few, I also met some interesting people like Jonathan Snook (Squarespace), Micah Snyder (Digg), Stephen Walther (Microsoft Senior Program Manager for ASP.NET) and Steve Souder (Google) (who gave me a personal demonstration of his new tool Sprite Me before his talk Sunday morning, it looks amazing). 

Rey Bango and I

Karl Swedburg and I

I also got to hang out with some guy named John Resig. I guess he’s important or something .  Seriously though, I’d like to thank John for the Conference and the hospitality he showed to the jQuery team during the time we were in Boston.

So what was announced at jQuery Conference regarding the jQuery project? 

1. The source code for jQuery core ismoving from Subversion to Github.
2. jQuery will soon be a part of Software Freedom Conservancy to help protect the project going forward.  This will move the copyright out from under John Resig’s name and into the Conservancy to make the jQuery project truly open source.  This will also give jQuery the benefit of a voting counsel on top decisions, no one person will hold the finances and the Conservancy will now offer free legal advice.
   
   The jQuery Team members sign the documents to join the Software Freedom Conservancy
3. Announced a revamped and simplified plugin repository. This is jQuery teams number one priority and is targeted to for release by end of year. (I will personally be working on the plugin repository)
4. jQuery 1.3.3 is close to release and already boasts overall speed improvements of 3.5 times faster, looking to land of couple more live events like blur and submit before release.
5. jQuery is planning version 1.4 to ship a stripped down version of jQuery for mobile devices. The mobile device will only strip out the Internet Explorer specific code to make the file smaller.  It will still contain all the same functionality as the full version.
6. jQuery team members Mike Hostetler and Jonathan Sharp have formed a company called AppendTo to provide paid support of jQuery.  This should help out Corporations who are holding off on using jQuery due to the lack of official support.
7. jQuery Infrastructure costs will be ~$0 starting in October.  Media Temple has graciously stepped up and is offering to build the project a server cluster and is providing their CDN for the project to use.  Current infrastructure costs run about $1600/month and rising with Amazon Cloudfront.  A cost that was totally unsustainable due to the growth of jQuery.
8. Plugin authors will soon have the ability to host their plugins on jQuery’s CDN.
9. jQuery will soon help organize and sponsor basic funding for local jQuery Meetups/Groups around the world. 
10. The jQuery Conference will now be held four times next year in Boston, London, San Francisco and Online.
11. Support that jQuery currently offers on Google Groups in the group jQuery-en will soon be transitioning to a forum site that will be set up.  Software is currently being evaluated to meet the needs of supporting users effectively and efficiently.

*Photos by Jörn Zaefferer