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And here’s what happened during the last presentations of BarCamp Brussels …

Some thoughts about TypO3 by Pieter Jelle De Brue

Pieter Jelle, of Statik, shared with us the experiences he had with using TypO3 to develop sites. (Gotta have guts with all the Drupal fans in the audience ;).) TypO3′s features include the basic CMS-features you’d expect, plus extensive user rights management and the possibility to create different data models and work with those to create custom database views … A great tool for creating presentational websites for business purposes. It’s not a blogging platform, and you’re bound to a tree-structure, nor has it got any community features; there’s other tools out there for this. I’m more curious about Drupal though … Someone selling extra time?

• TypO3, homepage

Firefox Extensions, ViewMyCurrency Case Study by Will Moffat

Firefox-fans united in the Passionate Users room for a talk about Firefox Extensions lead by Will Moffat, who started working on a impressive Firefox Extension 3 months ago. The extension will convert all prices it can find on any website into your own currency. For this it uses WebServices (to get the exchange rate), some heuristics (to determine where on the page prices are to be converted), some impressive XUL-skills … Will started of with a Greasemonkey script as the first draft and then looked and asked around. He suggested the Dive Into Greasemonkey book of Mark Pilgrim. I’ve been bookmarking lots of Firefox Extensions tutorials recently, time to read them … Or just dive into Will’s code, as an xpi-file in fact is a renamed zip-file.
A good extension starts with a great idea, and this sure is. A step closer to viewing the web you want it, your way … ?
Question for mr. Moffat though; does this extension have any impact on the speed you’re surfing over the web? I guess all the heuristics at every page load could slow things down.

• http://viewmycurrency.wordpress.com/, extension homepage
• BarCamp Brussels Firefox Extensions, post at Will Moffat’s site
• http://diveintogreasemonkey.org/, an introduction to writing GreaseMonkey scripts
• http://www.blogologie.be/2006/09/barcamp_video.html, video of the presentation available here

jQuery, making Javascript fun again by Steven Wittens

The last – and, to me, most interesting – speech was about jQuery. Steven started off with a brief but good introduction of what JavaScript is and why you shouldn’t be scared to start scripting. That introduction did me well, as to have a quick reminder and overview of JavaScript’s special features.
The interesting part was about the JavaScript library itself though. I had seen some jQuery magic in several freely available javascripts here and there, but never used it myself. For personal projects and at work I’ve always been using the Prototype javascript library which has been a god-gift, taking the pain out of js coding.
The jQuery library enables you te chain methods like crazy, which definitely makes for compact coding, but with the examples given I feel like it’s difficult to keep an overview. Getting used to I guess. On the other hand the jQuery selector function $(), that enables you to browse through your DOM as you would with CSS, definitely is amazing and a great feature. Now, if they could make this available into Prototype …
At the moment jQuery isn’t compatible with Prototype, as is. Because they both use a different implementation of a selector-function with the dollar-sign. With some patching it should be no problem to make them compatible, and Steven assured me the vibrant jQuery community would help me with that.

The topic I had been preparing yesterday for BarCamp was mentioned here too … A brief overview of the possible types of communication between your Javascript and server side scripts. I wish I had been able to finish my presentation about this topic, but it’s just been a very busy week and I must add I was a little unsure about the level/tone/type of presentation it should have been. Anyways, I asked Steven what he’d prefer his AJAX-requests to return: XML or JSON. He’d pick JSON because it’s such a native format for JavaScript. He also said he wouldn’t mind the eventual drop in speed (eval() is said to be slower then responseXML), since it’s on client-side it would only make a really big difference when processing thousands of records.

• http://acko.net/, homepage Steven Wittens
• http://jquery.com/, jQuery site
• Why jQuery’s Philosophy Is Better than Prototype’s
• video of this presentation, a few days earlier at the drupal con, same presentation

Up next: the roundup …

back to the Barcamp Brussels 2006 overview