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11 June London JavaScript get-together

Next Thursday and Friday I will attend the @media 2005 conference in London, where I hope to meet a few Web development luminaries like Jeffrey Zeldman, Joe Clark, Douglas Bowman, and many others, not to mention a few of my readers.

In addition, Dean Edwards, Jeremy Keith, Stuart Langridge, Simon Willison and myself will meet on Saturday 11 June for an informal JavaScript get-together, to which you, too, are invited.

Conference

At the conference I will busy myself with watching the proceedings and applauding the spekaers. I've never been to a real, pure Web development conference before, so I'm curious as to how it works. I hope to catch some useful tips and tricks, and to learn how to give a good presentation, since I don't consider it altogether impossible that one day I'll be a speaker at such a conference.

Of course there are also the networking lunches and dinners to look forward to, and I assume I'll meet some of my readers there. You can recognize me by the folded browser under my left arm.

JavaScript get-together

On Saturday 11 June, Dean Edwars, Jeremy Keith, Stuart Langridge, Simon Willison, I myself, and anyone who wants to come will informally get together in the Old Thameside Inn on the River Thames, near the replica of Sir Francis Drake's Golden Hind. The meeting will start at 14:00 hours (2pm British time) and will continue for as long as at least two participants are able to maintain an intelligent conversation.

There are three issues we'd like to discuss; the first two come from me, the third one from Simon:

1. The naming chaos. DHTML, DOM Scripting, ECMA, JScript, AJAX, what do they all mean? Right now I have the feeling these names are being used indiscriminately, and that one person's AJAX may be another person's DHTML. Can we come to central, widely accepted definitions of all these names? Do we need more or different names? Or is the current situation good enough for now?
2. window.onload. The load event is still crucial for starting up nearly all scripts that show more than an alert. Nonetheless the disadvantage is that the event fires only after all images have been loaded. Particularly when clueless clients upload 3M bitmaps, this may become something of a problem. Can we invent a better way to start our scripts?
3. (Simon's issue) JavaScript patterns - kind of like cookbook recipes, but more aimed at describing "best practises" for complicated scripting. I've been finding myself using closures for all kinds of things recently, but I've heard that these can lead to memory leaks in IE - a "pattern" for safely using them would be really valuable.
   I've never been a big fan of huge JavaScript libraries, but I do like the idea of coming up with a core set of idioms that naturally lead to more maintainable code.

I don't think we'll proclaim the JavaScript revolution right there and then, but maybe we'll get some useful insights and ideas. In any case, if you happen to be in London and happen to like JavaScript, drop by.

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