Full Frontal 2010

Last Friday I had the pleasure of attending Full Frontal 2010 which was held at the Duke of York’s cinema, Brighton. A super venue for an extremely informative and entertaining 1 day JavaScript conference. After attending in 2009 I didn’t want to miss out this year. If you’ve never been to the Duke of York’s cinema it’s well worth a visit; be warned though, the seats are very comfy and it’s quite hard to stay awake at times!

Full Frontal web conference with Remy Sharp
Slightly embarrassing moment for Remy via the Twitter board.

There were some truly excellent talks, ranging from IE6 and ChromeFrame to the latest developments in HTML5 and the mobile web. Big thank you to all the speakers they did a superb job:

  • Alex Russell: Excellent talk on ChromeFrame, an IE browser plug-in that replaces the IE render engine with that of Chrome (if enabled via a meta tag). He didn’t have many kind words to say about IE but then again who does.
  • Jan Lehnardt: Very informative talk on the mobile web, specifically some of the issues surrounding it. He then switched to CouchDB and how it could be used on a mobile device. CouchDB is a very powerful document-oriented database that can be accessed from anywhere that allows HTTP requests.
  • Paul Rouget: My favourite talk of the day. Paul is a development guru who works for Mozilla and his talk was on a few of the features we should look out for in Firefox 4. This included the Audio Data API, FileAPI and WebGL. WebGL looks, well, amazing!
  • Paul Bakaus: Who would have thought you could use JavaScript and the DOM to create a powerful gaming platform. Well Paul showed us you can by demoing his latest prototype using the Aves Engine to create a “Sims” like game… in JavaScript!
  • Dan Webb: Dan works or Twitter as a Front End Engineer. His talk was on how to get around the pesky same-origin problem when pulling in data from other sites. We have JSON-P sure, but there are other methods too; like postMessage, CORS and that old favourite the iframe.
  • Brian LeRoux: Brian is a developer on a product called PhoneGap which aims to plug the gaps for mobile developers and encourage handset creators into providing better API’s.
  • Seb Lee-Delisle: Seb is a very well known Flash developer but he also has many other skill sets up his sleeve. His talk ranged from 2D particles all the way to the Unity 3D Game Development tool. Incredibly inspirational talk with stunning demos. The future looks very exciting indeed!

The highlight for me was defiantly Paul Rougets talk on “Batshit crazy stuff you’ll be able to do in browsers”. He demonstrated a selection of custom builds of Firefox 4 and left everyone gob smacked with what HTML5 has in store. Using WebGL and the Audio Data API to create a 3D scene that reacts to the music as well as illustrating how useful the new Drag and Drop File API can be. As a bonus he even patched a version of Firefox to interface directly with his web-cam and take a photo and manipulated it via the browser; no plug-ins required! Just wow!

Big thank you to Remy and Julie for taking the time to organise this years event; hopefully I get to go again in 2011.

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