So I'm back from the jQuery conference and the AJAX experience in Boston (see more photos). Overall it was a pretty great experience. I got exposed to some cool, new stuff, met new people, and learned a lot. The projects I'm most excited to work on right now are graphics. There were a lot of libraries there for drawing elements in the browser space and I was impressed by most of them. Particularly cool, Processing.js by John Resig and Cappuccino by the 280 North group. Cappuccino is built on Objective-J, a strict superset of JS with optional classical inheritance and strong typing. It's a lot more overhead than processing.js but the idea of a desktop-like rich application on the web is cool. Plus the presenter was so crazy excited about it I couldn't help but be excited as well. Processing.js is John Resig's port of the processing visualization language (written in java) to JS. The performance of the demos was pretty impressive and it seems like it will be very fun to mess around with.

I also took some time out to learn Dojo. In general, I still am really drawn to the "unobtrusive" and elegant style of jQuery. But I did think Dojo would be good for implementing full scale web apps (as opposed to augmenting existing applications and pages) such as Disney's SAP site. It also has a great looking animations/graphing/charting library.

Probably one of my favorite parts of this conference was the lighting rounds. While I would say that all of the full length talks I went to were interesting, it was a fun experiment to have 5 minute snippets of cool projects people were working on. Particularly cool was smushit and the soon-to-be-premiering Netflix API. Did I mention I heart netflix and my Roku box? I can't wait to mess around with their API.

Anyways, there was a bunch of cool stuff including some pretty good UX talks and a nice little talk on interoperability in mashups. So, what a super exciting thing to go to in approx. my first year of doing web development. One thing I don't get, how do these guys get to come up with and support such great projects and still work full time? Maybe I have too much of a social life to truly commit to building big stuff but for now I'll have fun messing around with all these different toolboxes.