jQuery 101 Presentation

I just wrapped up my presentation on jQuery to the Alamo Area ColdFusion User Group. For a first run through, I think it went well. I've tried like heck to give new presentations this year, and this was one of two brand new presentations in the next 8 days. I had a bit too much material for the time allotted, so you will see me skip around a bit towards the end to wrap early. Also - I got some feedback saying I should maybe spend more time explaining what jQuery is up front. All excellent feedback. The first time giving a presentation can be both scary and educational as well. So thank you again to the Alamo!

You can find the embedded presentation below, as well as the recording URL here:

http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p87003729/

Please send me some feedback folks on how I can improve the presentation next time. Also, jQuery team, forgive me for bad mouthing the effects. I'm just not an effects guy. ;) (Than again, I wasn't too pleased with the UI stuff at first!)

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Michael Santoroski said on 04-07-2009 at 9:38 PM #
	Is there audio I am missing?

Raymond Camden said on 04-07-2009 at 9:41 PM #
	You won't see audio on the SlideSix one. You need to follow the link to the recorded URL. I know they heard me, so I hope the audio was recorded. :)

anthony said on 04-07-2009 at 10:10 PM #
	If you think that $().ready() is too short, $() will really annoy you.

Shane Zehnder said on 04-07-2009 at 11:38 PM #
	I think you did a good job covering all the basics of things. Figuring out selectors was one of my biggest hurdles and you explained that and the AJAX functions well. It helped me understand some things better. Plus I made it through the whole thing and I have a short attention span ;)

Shane Zehnder said on 04-07-2009 at 11:48 PM #
	Holy cow. I have been banging my head for weeks trying to figure out why my CFC's weren't working. I just removed the onRequest method and my problem is solved. A little OT, but it just made my day.

Kumar said on 04-08-2009 at 1:27 AM #

Looks good. I am thinking though maybe show off one of the Plug Ins, maybe jqGrid so the CF people can look at it and compare it to inbuild cfgrid (even if you don't explain the code in the Preso).

I also think an immediate question one would get from this preso would be, using jquery instead of CF8-Ajax stuff. So, maybe you want to add a slide on that. For me, its probably down to how much flexibility you want and whats your data size, for example, 5000 records, jqGrid is faster than cfgrid (very minor difference), but it goes up as I go to 50k records.

Monte Chan said on 04-08-2009 at 1:35 AM #
	Your voice came out good. As you indicated during the presentation, the microphone icon next to my name was going on and off; but my voice just was not recorded.

Raymond Camden said on 04-08-2009 at 6:14 AM #
	@anthony: Heh, for some reason, $("..") as a selector doesn't seem short, but $().ready() does. ;) @Kumar: I have a slide on plugins, but I skipped it because I ran out of time.

John Farrar said on 04-08-2009 at 10:42 AM #
	The UI stuff is a work in progress. Yet the same could be said of Spry... what it does is nice... but both have room to grow to catch up with EXTJS UI. jQuery UI is getting traction... would like to also see more work done with Spry!

Raymond Camden said on 04-08-2009 at 10:43 AM #
	@JF: Agreed. I actually had a slide on jQuery UI and some demos, but I cut it for time reasons.

Matt said on 04-08-2009 at 11:13 AM #
	Thanks for doing this for the rest of us. Appreciate your time!

anthony said on 04-08-2009 at 4:18 PM #
	@Ray I meant $() as the document ready function. If you pass a function in as an argument to $ it adds it to the dom ready stack.

Joel Cox said on 04-09-2009 at 10:01 AM #

Very nice intro to jQuery, Ray. You covered the bases well and I learned some useful stuff along the way.

I see that you used $("#select1 option:selected").val() to retrieve the value of a select box, but I have always found that $("#select1").val() will return the value of the selected option. Is there a reason to use the "option:selected" selector, like browser compatibility?

Another useful plugin is Throbber (http://plugins.jquery.com/project/throbber) to automatically display and hide those spinning loading animations. Like most things jQuery, it's just too dang simple to implement, makes me feel that I'm not working hard enough :).

Nando said on 04-09-2009 at 12:02 PM #
	Ray, Excellent introduction to jQuery! Thank you very much for putting that together, really. The only suggestion I have, since you asked, is that the preamble doesn't need to be so long. Ummm, you also indicated in the preso that you'd make the demo files available, and I came back just now to see if there was a download link yet, and I don't see it.

Raymond Camden said on 04-09-2009 at 12:17 PM #
	@Nando: You can download the files via the embedded the slideshow. Click the slidesix button. Thanks for the feedback.

Nando said on 04-09-2009 at 1:32 PM #
	If anyone else is looking for the sample files, you can find them by clicking the Menu button, bottom left of the embedded SlideSix thingy above > then at the top, click the Download Attachment button. Thanx again Ray!

Raymond Camden said on 04-09-2009 at 10:07 PM #
	Joel Cox: I used that form based on a jQuery Select cheatsheet I found recently. That's the only reason.

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