Academic exercises

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to speak for Bleking Tekniska Högskola (BTH) here in Sweden on the subject of Thin Server Architecture, which was something I just couldn't turn down, even though I'm in deep in several other things at the moment.

At my suggestion, I also made a couple of slides with exercises for the students in basic Dojo widgetry. Then I rememberd how confused I had been when I began to learn Dojo and the peculiarities of JavaScript like closures and Object Literals and such things, so I had to do some quick slides on those as well.

A lot o thanks goes out also to Stuart Langridge, whose presentation "secret of javascript closures" I was able to use, instead of writing my own :) It saved a lot of time.

All in all I was surprised in how many of the students that understood what I said, that was able to (or wanted to) follow the exercises and came up with good questions, and also had already seen the crockford vids on 'advanced javascript'. These guys were really up to speed! OK, they had only worked with jQuery/Mootools concatenation style toolkits before, so the relatively 'classic' coding style of Dojo was something new.

What I also realized is how truly huge Dojo is, when I tried to do a quick feature rundown. The 2D cross-browser Gfx, the charting support, fx and easings. Especially the animations was fun to show, as they're really completely generic and can be used to morph from one CSS class to another, or to change color, or to move an element on the page, according to the easing rules which determine how fast or slow to change the values over time. That's really slick.

Thanks to all the students (and teacher) for having me, and having tried this out I can say that I'm now officially prepared to teach at other places as well :)

Cheers,
PS

Comments

Glad the slides were helpful :)