[series of entries regarding my trip to JIA]

I really must commend Justin on an excellent presentation. This was one to attend. Maybe next year TSS can record the presentations and place them online to purchase and download. I would purchase and download this presentation even though I watched it live.

Justin really did an excellent job of taking the information and presenting it in a way that everyone near me in the audience could relate to. He used concrete examples. He showed us the browser and what everything he coded did. He had all his code in steps so he wasn't writing totally live, but still allowed for the feeling of the senior programming giving you some hints.

I loved that he really seemed excited about the topic that he was presenting. The energy and enthusiasm he exuded really permeated the room and energized everyone. A three-hour session can get very long if the presenter doesn't have the drive and the ability to keep the room going. Justin's session was the only one that I pulled out my laptop and was writing code in.

The examples that he pulled out were pretty cool as well. The first was a simple City/State lookup by zip code. Really just laying the groundwork. He presented some really interesting ideas. I never thought about sending just plain raw text down the pipe. I had always just assumed that XML was the way to go and then you'd parse/handle the text in your JS code. He even showed an example of sending JS code down the pipe and then eval()'ing it on the client-side. Which initially had me a little squeamish, but he made sure that our security fears were waved. Since most, (if not all), browsers run JS in a sandbox, so it can't hurt your system anyway. But he did then say that you could access all features if you added the JS to a jar and signed the jar. So I'm not sure how safe that is either, otherwise you just get guys signing their jars with self-generated certs to push malicious code. There must be more to it than what was covered.

All-in-all good tips, good code, good information, and good ideas for development. An A+ presentation.

Update: I have been informed that the presentation was not, in fact, presented by Dion Almaer but in fact by Justin Gehtland as Dion had a family event come up. While Justin did use Dion's slides, I wanted to update the post to give credit where credit is due. Thanks to all that commented to correct my mistake.