Finished up the AjaxWorld conference today. Great presentation from Yehuda Katz on some advanced jQuery techniques. An attendee in the audience actually stopped the presentation midway through and maligned him for having too much code. Technical content at a technology conference?!? How dare he! Once that unpleasantness passed, Yehuda went on to point out a very useful jQuery plugin called Live Query, where events could be bound to elements returned by jQuery selectors, even if they are inserted dynamically into a page later:

$('a') .livequery('click', function(event) { 
        alert('clicked'); 
        return false; 
    }); 

That is super dope. Later that morning, I also gave a presentation on Appcelerator and our Google App Engine integration point. I usually find myself giving high level presentations, as rarely are the members of the audience familiar with Appcelerator, but this time I tried to work in more substance by presenting an application that employed both GAE platform services and some reasonably interesting web expressions.

Powerful as the JavaScript examples I saw today were, I am still convinced of the utility of abstracting that JavaScript in the natural language syntax of the Web Expression Language. Treating user interaction, custom events, and remote data requests as messages on a shared message bus is a very useful model for allowing developers to focus on interaction design rather than the plumbing required to ultimately design your application’s behavior. All the same, I am awaiting the Appcelerator to jQuery port with bated breath so I can have the best of both worlds - the horsepower of jQuery when I do need it, but the ease of use and brevity of the web expression language when I don’t.