Despite reports to the contrary the GUI has changed very little since the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984 and research projects advancing the way humans interact with computers have been relegated to expensive and kaballistic departments at monopolistic institutions. So it should have been little surprise that it wasn't MIT that predicted the next interface revolution, but a single scientist working on a NeXT computer. This interface is the World Wide Web itself. But in the aftermath of the dotcom bust and the triumph of Internet Explorer, most of the early enthusiam behind the Internet waned. That is, until two web based programs, GMail and Google Maps, proved that the Web still has many untapped possibilities. Almost overnight Javascript, once ghettoized, has became the darling of the Web 2.0 world. Technical topics covered in this class will include advanced Javascript, DOM manipulation, Google maps API, XSLT, JSON, and XMLHttpRequest. We will focus on the Mootools Javascript Framework as the foundation for the these technologies. Mootools provides a large amount of out-of-box functionality while promoting the more exciting and advanced features of the javascript language. If you come from a Java or C-based programming background, be prepared to pretty much ditch everything you know :)
Please sign up for the mailing list as soon as possible. A big part of this class will be helping each other solve problems and directing each other to good resources. Unlike Processing, Javascript and AJAX reference is in abundance on the web, so having a searchable list of common issues will be a great resource for everyone. I will send the the invite using your NYU email address, if you would like for me to use a different please let me know as soon as possible.
In order to sign up you will need to subscribe to the class Google Calendar. Again I will send everyone an invite along with the mailing list invite. You will have the ability to edit the calendar. Because of the large number of people in the class, please keep your time slots to 15-30 minutes.
Please sign up for an appointment using the google calendar. I will email you invites for this as well.
All assignments must be turned in before the next class. You should upload all your exercises to your itp.nyu.edu account and email me the url. We’ll try to go over at least some of these at the start of each class.