Tom Robinson and Kris Kowal present Narwhal, an early implementation of the emerging CommonJS standard.
They will discuss the motivation and design goals behind Narwhal, and it's relationship to CommonJS. Topics covered include Narwhal's multiple JavaScript engine support, shell scripting, web applications, packages, package management, virtual environments, and select standard library modules.
Tom's Bio
Tom Robinson is a founder and developer at 280 North, a web software company best known for the Objective-J programming language and Cappuccino web application framework.
When he's not advancing client-side web application development, he works on improving the state of JavaScript as a general purpose programming language. Not content with the existing server-side JavaScript landscape, he started the Narwhal and Jack projects, and was an early member of the CommonJS standards group.
Kris' bio
Kris Kowal is a proponent of JavaScript modules. Kris created modules.js, a sync-XHR module system, in 2006. Kris co-proposed a module system for ECMAScript at the TC39 meeting in January 2009 with Ihab Awad from Google's Caja. Since that time, Ihab and Kris have worked with CommonJS to develop a standard for JavaScript standard library modules and module loaders, for which there are now about 10 loader implementations supporting web servers, shell scripts, secure sandboxes, browser plugins, and web pages. Kris presently develops web applications and conducts web performance research for FastSoft, a startup out of California's Institute of Technology, Caltech, and is an Apple alumnus.
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