I’ll be talking about JavaScript at Skills Matter on April 5th

On April 5th I’ll be giving a talk on JavaScript at SkillsMatter here in London. It’s being organized by the London .NET User Group, but it’s not a .NET talk. Instead, it’ll cover a range of topics related to JavaScript’s history, the current state of the language, and the future of this widely-used and widely-misunderstood language. 

JavaScript is fifteen years old, and the principles that influenced JavaScript’s architecture go back to the very dawn of computer science. It’s a powerful, expressive, dynamic language, that’s now being used to deliver some of the biggest and most popular software application in the world – and yet a whole generation of developers still thinks of JavaScript as being a scripting language that’s barely good enough to make pop-up windows appear on a web page.

There’s a lot of very cool stuff going on in the JavaScript world right now. With HTML5’s offline storage, you can use JavaScript to write client applications that you can install to your phone or your laptop and run them even when you’re offline. With CommonJS, there’s finally a unified effort to create a standard runtime library for JavaScript so we can write JS programs that support file systems, networking, loadable modules and unit tests. With NodeJS, there’s a fast, scalable  framework for writing HTTP servers as collections of discrete JavaScript components. With frameworks like KnockoutJS, there’s declarative support for building rich web user interfaces in JavaScript - and it’s still pretty good at doing pop-up windows as well.

So you think you know Javascript? Sign up, come along and find out. I’ll bet you a pint there’s something in there you’ve never seen before.