Fronteers 2012 - the best client development conference, part 2

In the continuation of the first part of the report , I will share my notes on the second day of the best conference on client development in Europe - Fronteers .

Plus a few words about the Jam Session , which took place the day before the conference.
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Video recordings of all reports are already available on Vimeo .

Open notebook of the second day of the conference.

(carefully, heavy graphics are present under the cut)

Jam session

On the official page of the event, you can find a list of all 17, ten-minute reports, as well as video recordings and slides from performances.

Records are also available in the iTunes podskchat , thanks to which you can download all reports for further viewing offline.

I will not talk about each report separately, I’ll tell you a couple of words about the event itself and pleasant moments.

New format

Jam Session was held in a bar, not far from the main conference venue. In a very close and cozy atmosphere, surrounded by about 170 people, the speakers took turns with their short speeches.

I liked the format of the event very much. Anyone who registered in advance on the site could come up with a report and share his experience.

I was extremely happy to see our compatriots on the stage - Anton , Varya and Roma . Regardless of the language barrier, our guys performed well, and set the beginning for the rapprochement of the Russian-speaking and English-speaking communities of web developers.

Next year, I also plan to give a short talk at the Jam Session, which I advise you! I hope I will live to see the day when our guys will perform on an equal footing on the big stage, alongside Paul Irish and other front-end stars!

Second day of the conference

The biggest devils in the smallest details

Marcin Wichary - Storify

And immediately, with the first slides, a brilliant engineer from Google set a new level of presentation, shaking the room with exciting effects and ideas.

Marcin and his team are developing Google doodles , which often amaze us on the main Google search page.

I strongly advise you to watch the video recording of the report, Marcin showed the highest level of presentation, the whole hall watched his speech almost with his mouth open.

I share my notes on the report:

• To implement cross-browser, productive animation and video on all devices and browsers, they wrote their 'crushinator' tool, which allows frame-by-frame animation, from a lightweight sprite with a set of frames
• It happened that a new release of Google Chrome was launched earlier, in order to adapt to the new Google Doodles, providing new browser features by the launch date of doodles (on the occasion of the Olympic games)

Open Source Ain't Free

David DeSandro - Slides



David talked about open source, and that it was time to change his views on some of its aspects.

If the source code, as in JavaScript, is available to everyone, this does not mean that all products written on it should be free.

Development and support of open source projects, it is very hard work, do not hesitate to take money for your work and user support. David mentioned that after the introduction of a licensing system for some of his products, the income from open source projects over the past year amounted to 25% of all his profits.

It is not necessary to hide the code in order to take money for it, the system works on the integrity of the developers.

The State of HTML5 Video

Jeroen Wijering - Storify

Yahon - the creator of JWPlayer , spoke about the current state of implementation of HTML5 Video, and showed many interesting examples that can be used now.

During the report, the main thesis of the development of JWPlayer for 2005 was mentioned - it was not necessary to sell a license for a player for Youtube for $ 15.

The sixth version of the player, by default already uses HTML5 technology.

I was very impressed with the demo with a strip of video previews , as in youtube, and search by text in video (by subtitles).

Building the web platform

Anne van Kesteren - Storify

The speaker talked about the development of standards specifications, and about the work of browsers from the inside, from the most important, I noted for myself:

• It must be remembered that the engine very often refers to selectors when drawing, hover and various ajax actions.
• Live DOM Viewer
• And again we return to an interesting article about how browsers work.

I can smell your CMS

Phil Hawksworth - Storify Slides



Phil told us about the problems of modern CMS, and pointed to common mistakes that should be avoided.

One of the main dilemmas in creating a CMS is simplicity, against extensibility, you always have to choose - either to give a lot of opportunities and then train the staff to use it, or to simplify everything and allow you to quickly and easily solve problems.

There is an acute problem of the generated links in the CMS, to which Phil illuminated a good part of his slides.

By the end of the report, an interesting Perch content organization system was mentioned. Golden middle, between simplicity and extensibility.

“Challenge CMS stink. Fight for the chance to do good on the web. "Phil Hawksworth (approx. Translation of" Fight bad CMS. Fight for the opportunity to make the web better. ")

Beyond simple transitions, with a pinch of javascript

Peter Nederlof - Storify , slides

Peter showed ways to work with advanced CSS animations - determining the current state on JS, stopping animation, etc.

For me, it was a discovery that CSS animations do not cause reflow during development. Due to the fact that these animations are static, you can calculate the display of elements in advance, as Peter recalled that CSS animations use the power of the GPU when rendering.

From notes:

• transitionEnd does not work if you abort animation
• Generator transformation matrices .

JS Minty Fresh: Identifying and Eliminating Smells in Your Code Base

Rebecca Murphey - Storify , slides

In the slides of the last speaker you will find a lot of useful tips for improving your JavaScript code, just remind you that all video recordings of reports are already available and available on Vimeo .

In conclusion

This is most likely my last review of conferences this year, if you like it, I advise you to read my report on Front-Trends . Both conferences really liked, I advise you to definitely visit them next year!

A little later, I will leave a note about the last Webconf conference in Riga, for which I gathered speakers in the client development section. Stay tuned!

If you have any suggestions and suggestions on conference reviews, write, I will try to put more valuable information into the article.

UPD

Promised second part of the report