This session featured 4 presenters, each representing one of the JavaScript libraries (JQuery, YUI, Dojo and Prototype). Each presenter did a 10 minute talk on something new and interesting relevant to their library. These were a bit mixed with John Resig’s talk on how the performance of jQuery is being improved probably the highlight. There followed a very interesting discussion and Q+A with subjects covered from ARIA and accessibillity to some discussion whch followed on from the earlier Even Faster Websites Talk very well.

A theme which has come up several times so far in Austin is JavaScript performance and how much effort is being put into improving it. Here John Resig gave us a look at a performance testing system he is creating, initially for jQuery, but that will eventually be available to test any scripts. The discussion then went on to how we can improve performance by taking advantage of some features of YUI to load scripts faster, which were based on those covered in the earlier session.

Another topic was ARIA and how it is being built into the libraries. This was the first time I had had ARIA explained to me and it now makes much more sense and seems to be a fairly straight forward spec to implement. Overall not a bad session, although some parts didn’t add much that isn’t already widely known.