Mozilla in Asia

Just a quick note to let you know that the 2009 Firefox Developers Conference in Tokyo will be on Sunday, Nov. 8th

Firefox Developers Conference 2009 – アドオンで Web の未来を切り開く！

The theme of this year’s developer conference is Add-ons, including Jetpack. The event is free but registration is required. Mozilla’s Aza Raskin and Chris Blizzard’s keynotes will be in English, but the rest of the presentations will be in Japanese.

If you would like to attend but do not read/write Japanese, please leave a comment here and I can help get you registered.  Hope to see you there!

UPDATE: for review, also take a look at the Firefox Developer Conference Summer 2007.

Mitcho’s presentation on the localization of Ubiquity at Tokyo 2.0 last night is up on Vimeo: Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web.

Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web from mitcho on Vimeo.

Slides here on SlideShare

Japanese programmer and blogger, Yusuke Kawasaki, has a nice post looking at various efforts around 3D in the browser with JavaScript and Canvas since 2006: The history of JavaScript’s 3D tech development.

Before most of popular browsers start to support canvas “3d” context, we JavaScript developers have struggled how to implement to enable 3D by JavaScript without any extensions like Java, Flash, etc. Here is a part of the history of JavaScript’s 3D tech development.

Kawasaki-san also covered Satoshi Ueyama’s recent work on 3D in JS and Canvas back in February, if you had missed it: Incredible JavaScript+Canvas 3D demos from Japan!

Ueyama-san, the programmer who made those 3D demos, is the same programmer who did those Gecko reflow videos (Japanese) that were widely blogged about and discussed at Doug Turner’s blog: What is a reflow?

EDIT: Unfortunately those reflow videos are no longer available at Google Video (grrr). I’ll see if Ueyama-san can upload them to a different video hosting site.

EDIT 2: Gecko reflow videos have been moved to Youtube thanks to Ueyama-san!

Gecko Reflow Visualization – google.co.jp

Gecko Reflow Visualization – mozilla.org

Gecko Reflow Visualization – Wikipedia

I really enjoyed this recent interview with Brendan Eich that Ben Galbraith & Dion Almaer of Ajaxian did back in 2007. It was slightly technical in parts but mostly talking about Mozilla and JavaScript history as well as Brendan’s own chosen path.

If the future interviews in this new Tech Luminaries series are as good, it wll be a great podcast.

Pretty slick Canvas demo: Canvas 3D & Flickr

More info here: Canvas in full 3D

via Mona Nomura

Lest anyone think Mozilla isn’t keenly focused on the speed of our next-generation JavaScript engine, TraceMonkey, Brendan Eich shares the news about where TraceMonkey stands vs. Google Chrome’s new V8 JS engine: Brendan’s Roadmap Updates – TraceMonkey Update.

More details at Brendan’s blog post.
UPDATE: Andreas Gal and Mike Shaver also share comments on TraceMonkey.

I’m in Taipei, Taiwan today to speak at COSCUP 2008 (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters), one of Taiwan’s leading OSS events.

Today, I’ll be speaking about Firefox 3.1, the new TraceMonkey announcement, and will do a quick overview of the major Mozilla Labs efforts. Tomorrow I’ll speak about Fennec, Mozilla’s mobile project.

Hope to see you there!

This post is for any of the Japanese readers I have.

ZDNet Japanさんが弊社の Brendan Eich との対談ビデオを日本語字幕で出しましたので JavaScript に興味を持つ方、ぜひご覧下さい。

ITの歴史にイノベーションを巻き起こした技術者に話を聞くシリーズインタビュー「Super Techies」。このビデオでは、現在MozillaのCTOであり、JavaScriptを開発したことでも知られるBrendan Eich氏が、シリコンバレーでのプログラマーとしてのキャリアや、Firefoxの展望について語る。

Mozilla CTOが語る「Netscape」から「Firefox」への軌跡

Steve Yegge (of Google) writes a lengthy post “Code’s Worst Enemy” on the various merits and demerits of various programming languages. He winds up endorsing Mozilla Rhino for the projects he is and will be working on in the future.  This is great news for Rhino as well as for the JavaScript programming community.

As it happens, though, I’ve settled on Rhino. I’ll be working with the Rhino dev team to help bring it up to spec with EcmaScript Edition 4. I believe that ES4 brings JavaScript to rough parity with Ruby and Python in terms of (a) expressiveness and (b) the ability to structure and manage larger code bases. Anything it lacks in sugar, it more than makes up for with its optional type annotations. And I think JavaScript (especially on ES4 steroids) is an easier sell than Ruby or Python to people who like curly braces, which is anyone currently using C++, Java, C#, JavaScript or Perl. That’s a whooole lot of curly brace lovers. I’m nothing if not practical these days.
…
When you’re ready to make the switch, well, Mozilla Rhino will be ready for you. It works great today and will be absolutely outstanding a year from now. And I sincerely hope that JRuby, Jython and friends will also be viable Java alternatives for you as well. You might even try them out now and see how it goes.

Last week John Resig, Mozilla’s JavaScript Evangelist, was in town to speak on Tamarin and ECMAScript 4 (i.e. JavaScript 2) at Adobe Max Japan, as well ‘The Future of JavaScript‘ an event organized by Mozilla Japan and supported by the JavaScript user community of Japan, Shibuya.JS. A few photos from John’s presentations are available on my Flickr account. The Adobe event had about 100 attendees and the Mozilla Japan event was sold out in less than 3 hours with 106 attendees. This was the second event we’ve done with Shibuya.JS (the first being Mozilla 24 where they had a very popular presentation.)

After John’s presentation, Yoshinori Takesato of Cybozu Labs presented a Shibuya.JS Digest. Yu Kobayashi, Hiroshi Shimoda of Clear Code, and amachang of Cybozu Labs also presented on the state of affairs of JavaScript in Japan and did a Q&A with Resig.

A few people in the audience blogged about the event including Jun Kaneko of Six Apart, naoya_t-san, nitoyon-san, and kawasaki-san.

共有と多様性 : The Future of JavaScript：Goodpic

Shibuya.JS×Mozilla Japan のイベントに John Resig が登場！

The Future of JavaScript メモ – てっく煮ブログ

紫ログ:The Future of JavaScript – livedoor Blog（ブログ）

We also had about 270 people watching the video stream at ustream.tv.

There are a bunch of photos from the event up on Flickr tagged ‘shibuyajs‘.

AtmarkIT (mainstream web media) covered the event:

大幅に機能を強化するECMAScript

Let me take a moment to highlight amachang-san’s presentation, ‘Fast JS XPath Engine for IE (and Safari2)’ which he has online at http://amachang.art-code.org/ejohn/

amachang uses jQuery and JavaScript to make a really cool browser-based presentation that looks a lot like Keynote but is online and searchable, etc.. The arrow keys (left and right) step through the presentation slide by slide. The up arrow key shows 20 slides at a time in a 4×5 matrix, and in the matrix mode, you can look at the next 20 slides by using the side arrow keys. The down-arrow key brings you back to the presentation slide. I highly recommend you try it- it’s quite cool.