Last week I had the chance to attend JSfoo, a two days conference on Javascript at Banglore, India. Theme of this event "Javascript everywhere" was well befitting to the event with the sessions on using Javascript in browser, server and embedded devices. There were many interesting and informative talks by peoples who have been working on Javascript from the earlier days of this language. Got a chance to meet some awesome guys who are passionate on different web technologies.
The program started with Keynote by Sunil Pai and Vishal Parpia on the evolution of javascript. They discussed about the starting and evolution of the language and the state of Javascript from the era of Internet explorer. It was great to know how the mostly used programming language, which revolutionized the web was actually born.
Though not all sessions were great, most of them was really interesting for me. Out of all, the most interesting sessions were about controlling hardware devices using Javascript. Well, did you ever think about a Javascript program controlling robots? It was real fun when the presenter Rakesh Pai ssh'ed into a Raspberry Pi powered robot car and started a node server inside it. Then he controlled the Car from a browser. He used a latest Raspberry Pi computer which acted as the server. Though using a high-level language for some low level programming can be an overkill, its really interesting that even front-end developers can create Robots. And of course, its promising too.
Another session was on interfacing hardware devices with Javascript. Speaker presented a Arduino powered robot which is controlled using Node.js Websocket server. Node application has a admin panel where admin can see who all trying to control the Robot. In order to control, admin should give explicit permission to the user. User will get an web interface to control robot after getting the permission. A machine running this server will communicate with the robot via Bluetooth. For this he had already created a Js library for interfacing Arduino over serial port. You can look at the speaker's blog post to know more about this.
Some other session I found really useful:
-Programming for Canvas with CreateJS - What can you do in 40 mins?
In this session speaker Harish gave a demonstration on how to use CreateJS for building Canvas games quickly with cross device support. He live coded the game from stage, which made the presentation even more interesting.
-Scaling with Unconventional Tech-Stack (nodejs + redis + mongodb)
This session was mostly about the speakers experiments on different technologies to build a chat server that can scale up to million users. Finally they end-up using NodeJs for the web socket server, redis for handling sessions and Mongodb for data store. He also discussed some issues like Socket starvation, faced with the tech stack and the workarounds for the same. Some node modules mentioned by the speaker :
Forever - A CLI tool for monitoring scripts. It can be used in Node.js application by requiring forever-monitor module. Node-optimist - A Node.js module for parsing commandline arguments
-Internationalize your web applications using Wikimedia i18n libraries
It was a really useful session by Santhosh Thottingal who works with Wikimedia language engineering team. He discussed some of the Javascript libraries and techniques used in Wikipedia, which supports more than 280 languages.
a) jquery.i18n A jquery based internationalization framework with plural, gender, grammar, number system support
b) jquery.webfonts - A general webfonts framework supporting many fonts from non-latin scripts
c) jquery.ime - A jQuery library for adding support for inputting in non latin scripts
d) jquery.uls- Universal language selector for selecting a language and configuring the settings
The projects are available at https://github.com/wikimedia/
-Beautiful Visualizations with d3.js
This was yet another great session in JSFoo'12, by [Anand S](http://s-anand.net/. In this workshop he explained some basic concepts of visualization and gave a walkthrough of some d3.js features and examples
More importantly I met with some peoples like Sadiq Ali,Kiran Jonnalagadda (@jackerhack), Cyriac Thomas (@cyriacthomas), etc. who I knew only in twitter.In between, I got a chance to solve the twitter puzzle by Multunus. It was my first ever ExpressJs app (and thanks Multunus for the puzzle :) ). Overall it was fun, informative and a great experience. Now I can't wait for the next JSfoo :)