Refresh Detroit JavaScript Library Techniques meeting

I’m just back from attending this meeting: [

Refresh Detroit » February 27, 2008 Meeting: JavaScript Library Techniques, Tips and Tricks]1. Part of the abstract:

The advent and popularity of JavaScript libraries has caused front-end programming paradigms to change drastically. Design patterns are emerging, object-oriented concepts are common place, and the line between client-side scripting and server-side scripting is beginning to blur.

The talk was given by Brian Reindel of Niche Retail. (Brian formerly worked at Fry Multimedia and his wife currently works there. I never worked at Fry, but I worked with a few Web Elite people who moved on to Fry.)

Brian was angling for a tricky sort of talk. He was shooting for a talk that would expand people’s horizons from doing very simple “everything is a global… just call it in onclick” sort of JavaScript work to more complicated techniques like the module pattern and callbacks. He briefly highlighted some of the techniques used by JavaScript libraries (jQuery is Brian’s favorite). There were some good questions about accessibility (I mentioned that this is one of Dojo’s strong suits) and other JavaScript-library related topics.

I think Brian did a good job for a fairly brief talk. It would have taken a long time for him to get into closures and prototypes which are topics that many casual JavaScript users are not familiar with.

This is the first Refresh Detroit meeting that I’ve attended. It seems like it’s hard to get the word out about local technology-related groups around here. Some of the group’s areas seem interesting to me, and it’s possible that I’ll do a talk at a future meeting.