Mobilism

9th & 10th November, 09:30 – 17:00
PPK at The Lighthouse

Web developers are enthusiastic about mobile, but need some background information as well as a chance to practice their skills on as many phones as possible. Therefore PPK will be running this workshop to teach you what you need to know.

We found that a one-day workshop is too short. By the time the first afternoon ends you've just started to understand what it's all about, and you're beginning to get some ideas for future experiments. Besides, you want to talk to your fellow attendees about practical problems and phones. Therefore our workshop is a two-day affair, and we'll also have dinner together at the end of day 1 (plus maybe a few beers, if you're so inclined).

We are not big believers in workshops where the teacher talks for eight hours straight. Therefore the idea is that you take a genuine project you have to work on for a genuine client, or, failing that, a mobile experiment you're working on. We'll discuss these practical examples, you'll work on them during the workshop, and we'll solve practical problems together.

We will take plenty of test phones, including a few obscure ones such as the Nokia N900 (Maemo), the HTC Smart (Brew MP), or a low-end LG Android, that we can try stuff on. If you have them you should also take a few phones, and not only iPhones or Androids. That allows you and your fellow attendees to test your websites on browsers and operating systems you've never even heard of. (Did we mention how exciting the mobile web is?)

What you'll learn

• General overview of the mobile (browser) landscape
• Dealing with viewports and media queries
• Using the touch events; differences with mouse events
• Basics of mobile JavaScript (mainly peformance and memory management). To be honest, this point mostly consists of: "don't automatically use a library."
• Mobile debugging
• Anything else you want to learn

You are expected to be proficient in desktop web development. If you also do JavaScript, it helps if you're proficient in librariless JavaScript development, since for now libraries are counter-indicated for mobile web sites.

Node & HTML5 for a real-time web

9th & 10th November, 09:30 – 17:00
Remy Sharp at The Lighthouse

JavaScript is increasingly seen as the ubiquitous language for developing for the web, so it stands to reason that JavaScript be used for the server side too.

Node allows for applications to be developed in JavaScript and is running on the incredibly fast V8 engine (the same JavaScript engine used to run Google Chrome). It can handle thousands of concurrent connections due to it’s event model, and because of this event model, developing for Node is very familiar if you’ve already written JavaScript for the browser - as this the same event model.

There are three ticket types available:

• Both days @ £595+VAT (evening meal included on Wednesday)
• Introduction to Node - one day @ £345+VAT
• Real-time: using HTML5 with node - one day @ £345+VAT

All ticket types include a full pass to the Friday conference day event.

Introduction to Node: Day 1

• The basics: Async development, modules, requires, exports and scope
• Building web servers: by hand, with Connect, with Express.js
• Working with document databases (mongodb & redis)
• Repo control, releasing and deploying using npm

Using HTML5 tech with node: Day 2

• Going real time: WebSockets and Socket.IO
• Building WebSockets from scratch and using Socket.IO
• Using WebSockets in the browser, with and without support
• Server sent events and long polling: building the server and clients

What do you need for this workshop?

• Node installed on your machine (0.4.0 is currently the latest stable release) (also available on Windows)
• Ideally have git installed
• A text editor (Vim, TextMate, Coda, Textpad++, etc)
• A browser with latest technology baked in, like Google Chrome for instance