Speakers


Rebecca Murphey

JavaScript Application Developer & Author

Rebecca Murphey

I am a JavaScript application developer and consultant, working to help clients write client-side applications that treat JavaScript as a rich and powerful language, not a toy. I'm the

co-host of the rollicking yayQuery podcast, the organizer of the unexpectedly epic TXJS, a contributor to the jQuery Cookbook from O'Reilly, and the author of jQuery Fundamentals.



Presentations

Cleaner, Leaner, Meaner: Refactoring Your JavaScript

Your first iteration of a feature gets the job done, but you have a sneaking suspicion it could be a whole lot cleaner. Where to start? Is refactoring worth the time?

In this talk, we'll look at strategies for refactoring our JavaScript, with a focus on isolating individual pieces of functionality and eliminating repetition. We'll weigh the evils of premature optimization against the imperative of lean, maintainable code, and you'll learn how to spot bad decisions you might be making in that first iteration, reducing the need for refactoring in the first place.

Beyond jQuery: A Gentle Introduction to Building Applications with Dojo

Leaving the comforts of a library like jQuery can feel daunting, but the needs of a non-trivial application often demand more than the much-loved library has to offer.

In this talk, we'll explore basic patterns for using the Dojo Toolkit to build applications. We'll look at its inheritance system, pub/sub mechanism for handling communication between components, templated widgets that encapsulate a feature and its DOM representation, and more. We'll also look at how to accomplish typical jQuery tasks like DOM manipulation, Ajax, and event connection using Dojo, giving you the know-how you need to safely venture beyond the world of jQuery.