On Friday, July 20th, Toronto played host to Throne of JS, a two-day conference focused on discussing and debating JavaScript frameworks. As a sponsor, we had the chance to attend the opening night event on Friday night at the Extension Room in the Distillery District.
The conference brought together the creators of every important client-side JS framework to try to answer the question that vexes many developers: “Which framework do I use and when?” This question seems especially timely, given today’s announcement of $11.2 Million of funding for the continued development of open source JS framework Meteor.
Throne of JS was orchestrated by the fantastic team at Unspace, a Toronto-based consulting and development shop (a name you might also recognize from their monthly Rails pub nite).
It’s quite amazing that this conference attracted so many high caliber speakers. About 250+ attendees paid between $600-800 each to interact with outstanding JS pioneers, including:
- Jeremy Ashkenas (creator of Backbone.js)
- Tom Dale & Yehuda Katz (two creators of Ember.js)
- Steve Sanderson (creator of Knockout.js)
- Igor Minar, Miško Hevery and Brad Green (leads of Angular.js)
- Nick Small (creator of Batman.js)
- John Bender (co-creator of jQuery Mobile)
Friday night’s event started the conference off in style, with Asian inspired food and a sword-fighting demo to kick off the Samurai-themed weekend. We had a great time meeting the attendees and finding out which frameworks they were most curious to learn about (Ember.js was a very popular answer).
It’s important that developers follow these types of events. With the increased movement towards client-side JS frameworks, the discussions that are happening now will likely have a huge impact on the ubiquity of certain frameworks in the future. Tom Dale (who raved about the conference on his Twitter feed) hinted at the underlying competition for dominance between these JS frameworks in this tongue-in-cheek tweet:
@tomdale: Been great meeting all of the other JavaScript MVC library authors. Nice guys. Makes it easy to forget you’re in a fight to the death.
We’re big advocates of staying on top of what’s going on in your industry. Not only does it show that you have passion for your craft, it also allows you to have intelligent conversations in job interviews and when networking, and can help you have more insight into the direction of your career path.
For those of you who missed out this year, here are some of the conference materials you can access online:
- Notes from Yehuda Katz’s talk on the thinking behind Ember.js
- Some Angular.js sample code from Igor Minar’s presentation
Don’t forget to keep an eye on Unspace.ca for news of upcoming events – they throw some of the coolest social events for developers in Toronto. With so many of this year’s presenters singing its praises, I don’t doubt that whatever they have in store for 2013 will attract even more innovators to Toronto.