Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog)

YUI Theater — John Resig, “Advancing JavaScript with Libraries”

John Resig, creator of the JQuery JavaScript library and author of Pro JavaScript Techniques, is a Mozilla Corp. technologist focused on the relationship between Mozilla and the world of JavaScript libraries. In that capacity, he’s embarked on some creative and compelling initiatives, including an effort to work with JavaScript library developers to help "future-proof" upcoming releases of Firefox by integrating those libraries’ test suites within the larger Mozilla QA process.

I’ve been impressed with the degree to which John’s work on JQuery shows an empathy for (and understanding of) his users, so I was gratified that he agreed to visit Yahoo! to give a broader talk about the role of JavaScript libraries within the web-development discipline. He was kind enough to let us record his session and share it as part of the YUI Theater series. Dion Almaer stopped by and wrote up some comprehensive notes on Ajaxian. I won’t try to replicate those here, but I do want to mention that John’s articulation of his development philosophy in this presentation goes a long way toward explaining the success that JQuery has enjoyed among developers. Embracing web developers, even those who might be "writing their first lines of code" using JQuery, has led John toward idioms that will feel comparatively natural and intuitive for someone coming from the world of CSS and markup rather than the world of C++ or EJBs. It was fun listening to John talk through that philosophy.

To conform to Yahoo! Video’s 100MB file-size limits, the hour-long talk is divided into two parts (Part One; Part Two). Part One is embedded below:

Note: This video is also available as a download in .m4v (MPEG-4) format that is both iPod-compatible and playable on almost any OS. In some cases, you may find that renaming the file to .mp4 helps your player recognize the format.

In Case You Missed…

Some other recent videos from the YUI Theater series:

1. Doug Geoffray: "From the Mouth of a ScreenReader" (Yahoo! Video | .m4v download)
2. Gopal Venkatesan: "Efficient JavaScript" (Yahoo! Video
3. Joe Hewitt: "Welcome to Firebug 1.0 " (Yahoo! Video | .m4v download)
4. Douglas Crockford, MC: "Browser Wars II: Attack of the DOMs" (Yahoo! Video | .m4v download)

Much more content, including Douglas’s well-received series of lectures on JavaScript, is available on the YUI Theater website.

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