krawaller

This post details the inception of a newly started course in Advanced JavaScript at Linnaeus University in the city of Kalmar, Sweden. I hope to follow this up with more posts detailing the journey of trying to wedge the RIA revolution into the conservative world of academia!

As all us Crockford fanboys and Ajaxian hangarounds are well aware, JavaScript has had an amazing renaissance the last few years, riding the Ajax wave to unforeseen fame and glory. Suddenly we find ourselves constructing fully fledged RIA:s using the same tool that was previously deemed capable only of minor website spiceups (and even that only when a Flash developer couldn't be found or bothered).

Last spring, I completed a 2-year university education in web programming at the Linnaeus University in Kalmar. In contrast to most other academic institutions, Kalmar (or at least the web development department) has managed to stay on the rapidly moving cutting edge. Thus we were always up to date with the latest and greatest toys, for example  being taught Silverlight and .NET MVC shortly after their release. All in all, I've been extremely pleased with the education, and being kicked out the door I felt well prepared to take on whatever web-related challenges were coming.

Like almost all web educations, however, it was heavily geared towards the server side of things. Which was useful and fun, to be sure, but for me C# and PHP both paled in comparison to the quicksilvery beauty of JavaScript. Maybe teaching mathematics as a dayjob has made me more susceptible to that sort of thing, I don't know, but somehow JavaScript's expressionistic quality, naked logic and formability (for lack of a better word) really struck a chord in me. I was in love!

The Kalmar web education has an optional third year where you have quite a bit of freedom in choosing what to dive into, the idea of course being allowing you find your niche in the surprisingly broad world of web work. Due to the previously mentioned JavaScript affliction I contracted during my two years, I wanted to dig deeper into that. And so I set out to try to find courses teaching advanced JavaScript. Kalmar didn't have any, but no matter, I thought – since I study over the internet anyway, if I could find a suitable course at any of the swedish universities, it could count towards my third year degree in Kalmar.

But, I found absolutely nothing. It turns out we'd been really spoiled in Kalmar, and being up to date is not something you can take for granted in a university education. Who knew? Not even in the ever changing landscape of web development, where knowledge grows stale with eerie speed. I found umpteen courses teaching "DHTML", using literature published in 2001, but absolutely nothing trying to sell JavaScript as anything else than a somewhat useful compliment to HTML.

I needed my JavaScript fix desperately, but there really was no course to be found. There was plenty of advanced courses in the server side realm, but none that let me embark on JavaScript adventures like the one my brother just posted about. So what's a guy to do? As it turned out, the solution was in a contemporary problem of mine; I hadn't finished (or started) my final exam project, in big part due to not finding an idea tasty enough to sink my teeth into. So I ended up creating my dream course myself, as my exam project. Suddenly spending evenings and nights (re)reading Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, Object Oriented JavaScript, JavaScript Design Patterns, uncountable blogs and source codes, etc etc etc, was not slacking about, but doing my job!

The result of those evenings is a new course titled "RIA-utveckling med JavaScript", translating to "Developing RIA with JavaScript". The maiden journey started a few weeks back, embarked on by ten brave students all doing the optional third year of the Linnaeus University Web Programming education.

In a following post I'll outline the content of the course, and talk a bit about how we arrived at the particular recipe used.