This past weekend (Apr 24th and 26th) the jQuery Team had their first west coast conference, and it was a total success. The sold-out event, with an attendance of 500 people, was the biggest JavaScript conference to date.

Throughout the conference it was evident that talks and takeaways were more far reaching than the world of jQuery alone. This was not, by any means, a conference about pure evangelism. This approach, in my mind, made the conference even more of a success.

In many of the talks, there was a common thread of thinking things through and being aware of the consequences that your choices bring. Out of context, this might seem like a no-brainer but in the real world of fast timelines, quick iterations and multiple ways of accomplishing the same thing, this theme can be an easy black hole to fall into. Developers were prompted by Robert Duffy to not be lazy when writing code in his High Performance jQuery talk. This wasn’t a finger pointing exercise, more like a reminder to be critical about our implementations. Often times a simple approach is the most efficient. This kind of thinking is what allows developers to create the most performing applications possible. Don’t get me wrong, we love jQuery but like any technology, use it wisely and know the implications of your choices.

These ideas were in line with the prevalent topic of performance and optimization of code. There were plenty of valuable takeaways with specific examples shown. Steve Souders talked about web performance and the importance of front-end optimization. He showed his P3PC project, which focuses on evaluating the negative impact that 3rd party scripts (such as ads) have on the performance of sites. Since he gave one of the early Saturday morning talks, he was also one of the first to discuss progressive rendering and blocking scripts.

One of my favorite talks was given by Nicholas C. Zakas. He gave some great insights on how the UI Thread works inside the browser, the differences between Repaint and Reflow and how to minimize scripts blocking page rendering (one of the main causes of UI seeming unresponsive to the user). He also introduced the concept of Web Workers, which Rick Waldron got into a lot more detail during his presentation (jQuery Hive and Pollen JS).

The conference ended with jQuery and jQuery UI keynotes. John Resig proudly showed off the incredible growth that jQuery has seen since it was first released and he presented the road map of features that the jQuery team is working on. One of the interesting things that he talked about was the current effort to bring jQuery to mobile devices. They already support it on the iPhone (+iPod touch and iPad), Android 2.1, Nokia S60v5 and Palm Pre but they are looking into expanding it to a lot more platforms in the next coming months. They have decided against creating specific jQuery mobile builds; instead, they are focusing on making the existing jQuery library work on mobile. This will simplify development and will easily allow for desktop sites to work on mobile browsers.

With the iPad recently being released, we are seeing a lot of buzz and interest from our clients to create applications for this new space of devices. The fact that Apple is not letting Flash apps into the App Store, (after changing clause 3.3.1 of the Developer Agreement) might generate even more interest in tools like jQTouch and PhoneGap to create web and native iPhone apps with JavaScript.

In a web plagued with implementation differences between browsers, jQuery was created by John Resig to provide a cross-browser, easy-to-use, concise and lightweight library to manipulate the DOM, handle events, animations, etc. Since then, jQuery has been rapidly growing both in adoption and features.

So what’s next for Resig? Last month, it was publicly announced that Microsoft would be adding their templating engine to jQuery as a plugin. He also mentioned that he’s currently talking to the W3C, Mozilla, etc about bringing jQuery code into the browser. Adding features to the spec as well as these being adopted by browsers is a very long process and no easy task (hello html5 audio tag, you are great and finally here but still so limited. And let’s not even talk about the audio format wars!). This proves Resig’s and the jQuery team’s long-term commitment to making the web a better place where standards make sense and we can all focus on actually getting the work done. Who knows how far we can take things down this path but just the fact that there is an open channel of communication between relevant organizations and the community is a very positive thing.

Thanks to the jQuery team, coordinators and sponsors for making this happen and to all the speakers for their valuable contributions. We are looking forward to seeing where things go from here.