YUIConf 2009: Great presentations, free beer and pizza!
Posted by Phillip Ball on 11/03/09Tags: Exponent , JavaScript , YUI
Last week I was very excited to attend the first ever conference of the increasingly popular YAHOO! User Interface Front-End Development Library of Tools: YUIConf 2009 held at YAHOO!'s Campus in Sunnyvale, CA. I've bean using YUI for several years now, integrating YUI's 2.x codeline in to Exponent CMS, and have begun integration of YUI's very impressive 3.x codeline as well. There was a heavy focus on YUI's recent release of YUI 3.0 GA, touting many great features such as speed over other libraries, an "Evolved" Events system, and a unified foundation for building widgets. Other aspects of the YUISuite were covered as well, including presentations of PHP Loader, YUITest, and YUIDoc. The Keynote Speakers: Brendan Eich and Douglas Crockford speaking on the history and standards of Javascript (ECMAScript), comparing the journey the Lord of the Rings and 12 Angry Men.
My focus at YUIConf as a Front-End Developer for OIC and Exponent CMS was to dive a bit deeper in to how to most effectively use YUI, attending the classes I felt would best benefit Exponent as a product. The first day of the conference I attended classes detailing YUI3's core a bit more in depth presented by the YUI Team's Matt Sweeney, Luke Smith, and Satyen Desai, breaking in the middle to catch Matt Snider of mint.com talk about his Storage Utility shipping with YUI 2.8. After Brendan Eich's over-the-top nerdy keynote on the history and future of Javascript, the presentation podium opened up for "Show and Tell". A good hand full of YUIers, including myself, took the rest of the evening presenting our works using YUI.
Day 2 for me was spent exploring a bit more of the peripheral projects of the YUI Suite: YUI Loader, YUITest, and YUIDoc presented by Chad Auld, Stephen Woods, Ron Adams. I was very impressed with all three, asking a batch of questions each session to get a bit further in to proper set up and overall direction of the codeset. My day ended with Dav Glass' exciting presentation of community involvement, including a step-through of the new YUI Gallery, which allows YUI community members to host their YUI 3 modules on YAHOO!'s CDN servers. The evening ended with a Keynote from Douglas Crockford, who elaborated on the struggles of the standardization of ECMAScript over the last 10 years.
YUIConf 2009 was a great success in my mind. The presentations were very well put together, and the presenters had full knowledge their topics at hand. Questions asked at the end of each session were repeated by the presenter as to make for more informative videos in YUI Theatre. The YUI Team seems to have a very keen focus on the current state and future of the web, making solid cases as to why their tools are so powerful and useful. I left the conference feeling very confident in OIC's choice to use the YUI toolset in our projects, and very excited to further integrate YUI systems in to Exponent CMS.
