San Francisco JavaScript Meetup #9

I made it over to SF last night for the JavaScript meetup and was really glad I did. The meetup was organized by Matt Humphrey, hosted at CBS Interactive, with lots of pizza provided by the recruiters Mainz Brady Group. It was a series of short presentations on a bunch of interesting projects.

Will Moffat talked about Acre, a server-side JavaScript project for building apps using data from Freebase.com, http://freebaseapps.com using MQL based on JSON to query Freebase for data you can mash up into your app. Acre is based on Rhino, and their app hosting service freebaseapps.com is set up to run untrusted code in a sandbox. Slides, IRC #freebase

Nosh Petigara of 10gen talked about MongoDB and its JavaScript shell. MongoDB is a document based schema-less database that is getting a lot of buzz lately, part of the NoSQL movement. IRC #mongodb

Tom Robinson of 280 North talked about the CommonJS specification and their implementation Narwhal, including JSGI and their implementation Jack, which is a JavaScript web server architecture modeled on Python's WSGI and Ruby's Rack. The general goal is to provide some unifying standard APIs to bridge server side and general purpose JavaScript application development. He mentioned that the Async JSGI spec is in progress, looking towards hooking into the node.js projectIRC #commonjs, #narwhal

Marcus Westin talked about Realtime Templates built on node.js and demoed fin as an example. This was a small database view where his edits in one browser immediately updated another view of the same object in another browser, similar to the way you see updates in Google Wave.

Mats Bryntse showed Ext-Scheduler, a calender and scheduling plugin based on the Ext JavaScript library. The calendar was very nice and he is working on a Gantt chart view.

Adam Abrons (Pivotal Labs) and Misko Hevery talked about their open source project angular.js aimed at making it easier to build simple apps in the browser. GitHub repo They demoed an example online testing app.