Mark Volkmann
Software Consultant and Partner at OCI
Mark Volkmann has been a software consultant for Object Computing, Inc. (OCI) in St. Louis since 1996. He has been developing software in Java since 1995.
Mark has created and teaches many courses in Java, XML and Ruby. They include: Introduction to Java, Java Syntax for Non-C Programmers, Java Programming, Advanced Java Programming, Creating Graphical User Interfaces Using Java (Swing), eXtensible Markup Language (XML), XML Programming Using Java and Web Services Using Java, and Ruby Programming.
Mark is a member of the St. Louis Java User Group steering committee and a regular presenter for that group. He has written for XML Journal. Mark has also presented at XML DevCon conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff Java symposiums
and the St. Louis Ruby User Group.
Presentations
jQuery - RIA Miracle!
Developing rich internet applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript is now a common exercise. While it can be done using only those client-side technologies, JavaScript libraries greatly simplify the task. They also shield developers from most browser differences. The jQuery JavaScript library is a very popular option.
This talk demonstrates building a web application using jQuery. It includes use of jQuery selectors to access DOM elements and attributes, DOM traversal, CSS manipulation, mouse and keyboard event handling, Ajax calls to server-side code using JSON to represent data, dynamic HTML modification, and jQuery UI widgets.
Node.js - the core
Node is a programming environment implemented on Google's V8 JavaScript engine. Node is well-suited for implementing server applications that are primarily I/O-bound rather than compute-bound. It supports a variety of network protocols such as HTTP and TCP.
While Node's primary programming language is JavaScript, applications can be extended with code written in C and C++. It has excellent performance characteristics, in part because its performance critical underpinnings are written in C/C++. Node enables web development where the same familiar programming language, JavaScript, is used for the client and server.
Making effective use of any programming environment requires a certain amount of familiarity with it's provided libraries. Imagine trying to write a Java application without knowing what is available in the java.* and javax.* packages. Rather than "packages", Node has "modules". Provided modules are referred to as the "core modules".
This talk begins with an overview of Node. It then provides a review of the core modules including examples of commonly used functions. Armed with this knowledge, you'll be ready to begin writing Node applications.
