The Cincinnati Agile Round Table brought in Centric’s Eric Galluzzo to talk on Javascript.  Yeah.  Javascript.  Now before you groan in mundanacy (that is a word, right?), Javascript is OO with with inheritance and polymorphic properties.  You can even use reflection with a for(var property in object) syntax which returns fields and methods.  Sure it’s a little basterdized, but, hey, it’s there.  And perhaps 2.0 will bring some consistency to implementation of the advanced features.  My favorite quote from the evening?  “Who knew the ‘U’ in ‘CRUD’ meant ‘update’?”

Anyway, Javascript, besides being the quick-n-dirty scripting language that every basic web developer uses to glue some things together, is an object-based, prototype-based language that can leverage the properties and behaviors of inheritance. And it’s used all over the place.  The entire suite of Adobe products are extendible with Javascript.  JsUnit exits for Javascript unit testing.  It is a full-featured language - even if it’s not compiled.

Circa 2000, I had an opportunity to write some OO Javascript, but I didn’t really know what I was doing.  I didn’t know what the correct implementation was and I was piecing together what information I could find on the internet at a time that not much was published about the OO abilities of Javascript.  You’ll see that in my code.  I didn’t pretty it up nicely, and you’ll have to do a “view source” to see it.  In fact, I didn’t really understand the business rules of the page completely, either, and 8 years later I haven’t the faintest clue what this thing does.  But you’ll note that in real-time you can’t put characters in the text fields that aren’t allowed and the thing calculates formulas with each digit.  I’m not sure what Eric might say about the code, itself.

Some good references for Javascript:

• JsUnit
• The Spidermonkey Javascript Engine
• The Prototype Javascript Framework
• jQuery - the way cool kids do Javascript
• QuirksMode for all your browser quirks
• TrimJunction - the port of Rails for Javascript
• Mozilla’s Brendan Eich’s Javascript 2 presentation

After the meeting, Mark Windholtz, Ed Summerfield, and Jim Weirich spent some time with me discussing and recording their thoughts on the business value of agile.  The outcome was somewhat remarkable and surprising.  If you know these guys, they pioneered much of the local efforts in XP and agile in the late 90’s and early turn of the century.  Their thoughts are extremely valuable.  After some thinking, we decided what we recorded is actually part 2 and we need to go back and do part 1.  So I won’t spoil the surprise.  I’ll get these podcasts up once I get them both recorded and we’re all happy with them.

Finally, we finished the night at Habanero on Ludlow.  Hands-down the best burrito spot in Cincinnati.  You have to try their chips and salsa.  It’s different than the run-of-the-mill stuff at the chain stores.  My wife and I will drive down from the West-Chester/Hamilton area just to get Habanero’s.

- Andy