In our company it became a tradition to run an annual symposium on software development in New York City. This is a technical event with zero marketing, where our engineers are given an opportunity to share their experience gained while develping real-world applications. This year we’ll focus on the Web applications developed with HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and Java. I’ll be making two presentations there.

1. Advanced Introduction to JavaScript

“Advanced Introduction” means that we’ll start from scratch, but the complexity of the materials will rapidly increase, and by the end of the talk you’ll start respecting JavaScript a lot. The thing is that some software developers have an impression that JavaScript is a second-league interpreted language with the main purpose of making Web pages a little prettier. The reality is different though. JavaScript is a powerful, flexible, dynamically typed language that supports object-oriented programming. JavaScript functions are the first class citizen that can live their own lives as opposed to Java’s methods. HTML5 becomes a new buzzword, but 80% of development time on such projects is spent writing JavaScript code.

2. Who Moved My Web to Mobile

IMHO, this topic becomes important and practical for many software developers, team leads, and managers. Sooner or later the budget will be approved, and you won’t be able to postpone the migration of your Web site or application to mobile devices any further. How to start moving your tried and true JSP/Struts Web site to this wild new world of mobile devices? Is it possible to develop one Web site that looks good on desktops, tablets, on smartfones? Should you go with HTML5 or native mobile applications? What about Adobe AIR? In this presentation we’ll discuss pros and cons of various approaches. You’ll also see the comparison of two JavaScript mobile frameworks: JQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch.
Although it may sound immodest of me to say so (what’s new?), this presentation is the most efficient way of getting a hang of all these topicsin a short period of time.

Hope to see you there.

Yakov