First Canberra JavaScript Meetup

Web application design company Icelab hosted the First Canberra JavaScript Meetup last night at its Civic office.

Christopher Giffard talked about Behavior Assertion Sheets (Bas), for integration testing of web applications. Uses CSS syntax as a declarative language, accessibility. As example would be to make sure headings of a web pages are readable to a specified level.

Ben Williamson of Reasonwell demonstrated parsing URLs to extract user data (such as user names) This has an addition benefit that invalid URLs (according to the constructed Parser) are rejected rather than producing some unexpected result.

A prototype of the new Blogging platform Ghost was demonstrated. It is implemented using some concepts from the Haskal programming language.

It was interesting to see esoteric concepts which computing students grumble about learning, but applied in real world applications.

The meetup was held in the the Icelab office in civic, in the Canberra Innovation Precinct next to ANU. This area has expanded beyond the planned City West development and is spreading organically into the adjacent city offices. Icelab have a typical high tech startup office with beanbags, Aeron chairs by Herman Miller, Ball Chairs by Eero Aarnio (for that Austin Powers look), a sofa and bicycles in the corner.