Developer: wp.awesome! Little known WordPress JS helpers

For our next Developer's meetup, Luke Woodward from 10up will be stopping by to discuss some of the lesser known JS APIs in WordPress. His talk description is as follows:

It is pretty hard to miss the cool new Media Modal that came to WordPress core in 3.5. Backbone and Underscores are exciting additions that allow more scalable Javascript creation, both on the front and back end of the system. These are major additions to the code base and real wins across the board.

Along with these great new tools came some other, smaller utilities and helpers that make the life of a WordPress Javascript developer just a bit easier; however, they have received almost no attention. Most developers I've spoken to don't even know they exist! So let's explore just some of the hidden wonders in the 'wp' object.

We'll look at:

• wp.ajax - A jQuery ajax wrapper that makes ajax a breeze. All you need is an action and a callback function. * wp.template - A templating method that makes turning data into DOM node just a bit easier. * wp.shortcode - Shortcode parsing in Javascript, because who in their right mind wants to write that. * wp.html - A way of representing HTML as a Javascript object.