Yehuda Katz is a well respected figure in the Ruby and JS communities, so it was no surprise that it was packed house that turned up to see him last night in Brisbane. And whilst the room was hot, there was a lack of chairs and Yehuda himself was getting frustrated with the feedback and cutoff in the house audio system, it was a great night organised by Nigel Rausch on behalf of the guys at Ninefold.

Here were a couple of items I picked up on his talk on Ember.js:

• like Ruby and Rails, Ember.js is not optimised for computer science but for developer happiness
• ambitious app – optimised for building entire applications, long lived applications (like Gmail, lasts on the screen for a very long time) need a sophisticated architecture
• MVC is not quite enough – model (all sessions), controller (just this session), view (what is currently visible)
• use HTML and CSS to layout application, is the lingua franca of the web
• HTML needs more dynamic features – {{ for data binding, # block form in Ember
• URLs are important – good applications have good URL support – like Twitter or Rdio – primary way that people share information in Twitter and email for example – is the UI of the web, we should use them more universally and use them everywhere

Yehuda then gave a demo. Having not used Ember.js before I was impressed by how easy it was to build URLs and interactivity. I certainly will give it a closer look at some stage.

• future of the web – take a look at the google project – Polymer
• evergreen browsers – Chrome started this, once you download the browser that is permission enough to download new versions of the browsers ; Safari has not adopted this and will probably become the next IE6!
• some good resources include embercasts and Ember 101

There was also an interesting kick off presentation by Toby Hede about some of the cool stuff Ninefold are doing, if for nothing else the animations were amusing!