I went to see Jay Caines-Gooby talk about jQuery last night. It was part of the Sussex Geek Dinner thing. jQuery looks really, really cool. I like prototype, but jQuery looks like it tries to do less. I was particularly impressed at Jay mentioning that the developers were taking features out. There are plugins for people who want more.
But what was really impressive was the revelation that he’d written the presentation itself in jQuery the previous night. Apparently it was about 50 lines of code, which he’d christened “bumnote” (as opposed to keynote), most of which got shown as part of the show. There’s a lot of power in there.
Apparently, it’s also good for making Unobtrusive JavaScript—there was an imposing picture of Jeremy in there.
It’s really good to try and get geeks together in Brighton, and this seems to be working well. I’ve come to realise that there are a large number of technical types in Brighton, but they tend to form in smaller communities. A case in point: yesterday evening I was in the pub with a few members from Brighton LUG (mailing list), and there was no overlap with the geek dinner. There’s at least one big divide between back-end types and front-end types. And then there’s a bunch like Flash Coders Brighton. And the farm.
There appears to be little crossover between all these groups, apart from the BNM list and events like d.Construct. Geek dinners feels nice because it’s starting to appeal to lots more people…
Jabbering Giraffe 
3 replies on “jQuery in Brighton”
What makes jQuery great isn’t just doing less, but doing more of less: rather than providing a lot of functionality, it just thoroughly addresses all the frequently exposed pain points of Javascript coding. Brilliant piece of work.
I was annoyed I missed that talk, and I’m looking forward to a podcast if there is one coming.
What was the significance of taking out features from JQuery?
On the Brighton ‘New Media’ side of things, I was talking to some chaps up in London and they were impressed by Brighton’s techy community, not just for its size.
The significance is that the people behind jQuery are interested in a quality API, not a “kitchen sink” approach. It’s not that they’re taking features out. It’s more that they’re removing things that don’t fit, in order to leave a more streamlined and understandable API. At least, that was my impression from Jay’s talk.
TBH, I have great respect for people who can remove code full stop. It’s a lot harder to remove code than to add it.