At the PHPgg Frontend Special I first heard of Fronteers, an association of dutch front-end developers. Past tuesday they had a meeting at Media College in Amsterdam. As meetings are open for non(yet)-members it was a nice opportunity to get to know more about Fronteers. Two topics were scheduled: jQuery and SUAVE.

jQuery

Until now I have mainly used the Prototype framework for Javascript projects. As the prototype library, escpecially when bundled with scriptaculous, is quite ‘big’ I was interested in hearing some more about the ‘lean and mean’ jQuery. In a short (but focussed) presentation of Edwin Martin some of the key aspects of jQuery were illustrated, most notably: Method chaining, Plugins (nice for keeping things organised) and Live events (curious about performance). The jQuery motto ‘do more, write less’ definitely stands although the functionality seems really focused on selecting, modifying and event-binding. I was missing Prototype’s class inheritance but as I read from the Fronteers meeting report that’s being worked in in the form of Classy Query.

Suave

Next was a presentation, delivered by Marcel Beumer and Vincent Hillenbrink, about Suave, a stand-alone front-end. It’s a MVC based framework that allows front-end developers to communicate with a ‘back-end’ that exists solely in the viewer’s browser. This way front-end developers can start creating templates and interaction and show working versions, without being dependent on properly functioning back-end software. In the background there is some XSLT databound templating going on thereby allowing for easy integration with back-end software once it’s ready. Suave isn’t finished yet so no online information is available. They aim at releasing a first version in about half a year, bundled with examples demonstrating it’s potential.

Of course there was plenty of time after the presentations to meet some people and chat with co-front-end-developers. Nice meeting!