Austin Chau and I are here on the Yahoo campus for the Yahoo BrowserPlus release party. I’m going to blog the event as it happens here (Disclosure: I work for Google with the Open Web Advocacy and Gears teams).
First, Ernest Delgado, Canvas whiz here at Yahoo, sent me a cool demo showing a prototype he and Michael …

SitePen has built an interesting set of APIs to enable you to create better JavaScript applications that run in the AIR platform:

This new effort creates a new namespace, dair, making it even easier to
create rich desktop apps using the Dojo Toolkit and Adobe AIR like the
Dojo Toolbox.
The extensions offer convenience methods for your …

Tom Trenka has a nice posting on Dojo and Firebug Tricks for Development where he shares two of his own:
Trick #1: using window.location.search to enable Firebug Lite on the fly
With the Dojo Toolkit, I find this trick indispensable. The basic concept is to use the original version of the djConfig variable—the object-based one—using a boolean to enable or disable …

With the rich JavaScript library ecosystem, it can be extremely difficult to make informed decisions when choosing which libraries to use for your own projects. Because no one has time to analyze each library in detail themselves, such decisions are usually made by getting a feel for what the “street” thinks and making the safe choice. Unfortunately, sometimes the word …

Continuing with SitePen stories for today, Dustin Machi posted a short but interesting piece on how to detect loss of focus on IE6.

So your cool new app is perfect, but you want it to lock the user out when the browser hasn’t had focus after 15 minutes? Well that’s easy you think, I’ll just connect to the document’s blur …

James Burke gave a great presentation in Boston on the Dojo build system, and how he is able to get the core down to 5.5k.

With Dojo 1.2, the build system can generate a 5.5KB gzipped (13KB ungzipped) dojo.js file, via the customBase layer option. Useful for iPhone development if you want to get under the 25KB uncompressed size limits …

I have seen some of the great applications that SitePen produces, but unfortunately too many of them are for companies behind the firewalls.
It is great to see Sensei a really compelling Dojo application that SitePen wrote for their training class. This isn’t one of those simple training examples that you …

Whenever Abe Fettig is in town I think about how painful his live has been working with rich text editors Stuart Atkinson has kindly done a roundup of the state of rich text editors, and it covers:

TinyMCE: There’s a modified version of this included in Wordpress these days, and it’s extremely well supported by its developers. …

Shane O’Sullivan has built a nice search mashup experience called Chofter. It uses all things Dojo, including:

Layouts, Dialogs, Menus and ContentPanes for the user interface.
dojo.data and dojo.rpc for data transfer.
dojox.dtl (Django Templating Library) for transforming search data into visuals.
dojo.fx and FisheyeLite for …

Pete Higgins released Dojo 1.2 the first version under his command. There are a ton of subtle improvements such as:
New Datastores

dojox.data.JsonRestStore
dojox.data.CouchDBRestStore
dojox.data.GoogleFeedStore: A Google AJAX API powered data store for retrieving RSS and Atom feeds from Google.
dojox.data.GoogleSearchStore: Data stores to interface Google’s AJAX search services.
dojox.data.PersevereStore: dojox.data.PersevereStore is an extension of JsonRestStore to Persevere’s special features.
dojox.data.S3Store: an extension of JsonRestStore to …

Blaine Ehrhart wrote a fun little fish tank using Dojo, as another example of doing animation using JavaScript, which includes the following to give you a taste:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:

function playBubble (target,newbubble) {

        var top = parseInt(target.style.top);

        var left = parseInt(target.style.left);

        var rand …

Dojo is a popular JavaScript toolkit and this quick guide will jump start you on your way to creating your own custom Dojo widgets. Plenty of example code is used.

Zend Framework users know that Dojo toolkit is integrated to 1.6+ release. In the previous post I demonstrated how to add a cool Dojo date picker widget to your text input form element by manually typing the JavaScript code. In this post let us discover how to create a cool date picker form element with Zend_Dojo.

The Dojo team has put out the much anticipated release candidate for the Dojo Toolkit 1.2. Lots of work has gone into this with new updates and features galore added to this release:

1000+ changes, improvements, and bug fixes since the 1.1.1 release
Huge improvements to Dijit include .attr() for getting and setting all attributes, and performance and polish improvements across …

Matthew Russell is blogging and screencasting work from Dojo: The Definitive Guide and has put together a piece on a simple, degradable reflection widget using dojo.gfx:

Reflection has been in vogue for a while now in user interfaces, and it wasn’t long ago that I saw a headline about a JavaScript library that streamlined a number of …

I found this sweet online tool called CompressorRater that compresses javascript using all the top compression engines around, and it provides really detailed results..

If you’ve ever been curious as to what goes into building a Adobe AIR application, then read Kevin Dangoor’s account of how the Dojo Toolbox was built:
Building the Dojo Toolbox allowed us to dive into Adobe® AIR™, and to create a blended toolchain of JavaScript, PHP, Python and Rhino (JavaScript on the Java Virtual Machine) for developing an …

Over on the Open Web Podcast the crew interviewed Allen Wirfs-Brock, and Pratap Lakshman from Microsoft on ECMAScript, IE 8, and more. It was a real pleasure to chat with these guys as they talked on a variety of issues, even including their thoughts on business models on the Web!

Allen Wirfs-Brock is the standards guy from Microsoft who …

Tom Trenka has a fantastic post on custom fonts with dojo.gfx that shows the SVG font definition implementation.
Part one of the article deals with painful, practical issues around the licensing of fonts. Tom discusses the various technical options out there, and then gets to the solution:

In general, the issues surrounding font usage have to do with the …

SitePen continues their work on Deft with a multi-file uploader:

The Dojo Toolkit now has support for multi-file uploads, thanks to the new Deft project. The dojox.form.FileUploader class embeds a hidden SWF file in the page which, when triggered, will open a system dialog that supports multiple file selection, and also …

While porting Dojo on GWT, the DWT team faces some interesting challenges - JavaScript vs. Java.Here’s a shot to allow Template-Based Widgets for GWT, as what is supported in Dijit - The Dojo Widgeting Engine…

Dojo has some nice new compound effects in the works. Some of the new effects include block fades, disintergrate, explode, shear, and pinwheel.
Each effect can be tweaked with config such as:

The number of rows and columns in which to split the element
The distance the pieces travel (as a multiple …

But fighting the web is like holding back the ocean; it will route around you or it will wear you down, but will never go away, and it will never tire or give up. Yet in spite of the futility of fighting the web, Silverlight is being positioned in opposition to the web, not in support of it

This is one …

Welcome to the inaugural episode of a new podcast to cover news, happenings, and our opinions on the Open Web (download the Open Web Podcast episode one directly or subscribe to it). When I say “our” I am talking about the founding podcasters: Alex Russell, John Resig, and myself. It is a pleasure to be able to …

Tom Trenka of SitePen has created a new top-level Dojo package called Deft which “focuses on ActionScript components created in support of the various projects within the Dojo Toolkit (mostly for DojoX). Deft source files are well organized based in part on the organization of other Dojo Toolkit projects, as well …

Vladimir Vuki?evi? normally hacks on Mozilla products, but spent a little time on an experiment with IE. An experiment that looks very exciting indeed.
I love canvas, and wish that it was ubiquitous. We have great wrappers out there such as dojo.gfx, but wouldn’t it be nice if canvas worked everywhere? (and the full API to boot).
Well, Vladimir has …

We have written about using window.name as a transport and Kris Zyp has just posted about how Dojo has created a new dojox.io.windowName module.

The window.name transport is a new technique for secure cross-domain browser based data transfer, and can be utilized for creating secure mashups with untrusted sources. window.name is implemented in Dojo in the new dojox.io.windowName …

Dojo developers will be pleased to read about the recent update to the Dojo grid control. Version 1.2 of the grid control focuses primarily on improving integration with Dojo data stores, improved grid layout handling and providing advanced in-place editing capabilities. The update was fairly extensive forcing the team to rethink the design of the widget and refactor …

Ever had a situation where you’ve desperately needed to get API information for your favorite toolkit only to find that the site is offline for some reason? The Dojo Toolbox aims to tackle this through the use of Adobe’s AIR runtime. Built using the Dojo framework, the Dojo Toolbox allows for offline viewing of Dojo’s API making it …

Revin Guillen has posted about the Dojo dojo.data API and how you can layer access to Web services in a very elegant way.
His example shows building access to Wikipedia (demo):

Dojo recently received a new data store that demonstrates exactly what we want: dojox.data.WikipediaStore. It does just what it sounds like, turning Wikipedia into a simple object you can …

Dylan Schiemann has a really nice case study post on implementing a Flickr badge with Dojo.
What is particularly interesting is how he starts with a simple version:
PLAIN TEXT
HTML:

<head>

…

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”/dojo/dojox/image/resources/image.css” />

<style type=”text/css”>

        img.thing { width:50px; height:50px; }

</style>

…

</head>

<body>

…

<div dojoType=”dojox.image.FlickrBadge” rows=”8″ cols=”3″ username=”dylans”

        …

James Burke of AOL announced that AOL has released Dojo modules which wrap AOL’s Web AIM API. This is a very big announcement as the Web AIM API lets developers incorporate core AIM functionality into any web page including the ability to sign on, send and receive IMs, and obtain a user’s Buddy List.
My employer, AOL, …

Nexaweb has released a new product that build on Dojo, dojo.E:

dojo.E provides developers with the ability to use an XML based markup language to add in their Ajax behaviors. Markup whether — XML, HTML or CSS — simplifies development by allow developers to convey in simple text format what they would otherwise need to convey in code. Markup …

Over the last few months we have been working on the dojo.E project and just released the first version. dojo.E is designed to be a small JavaScript library that developers use in conjunction with the dojo toolkit. Completely open source the library is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

Mike Wilcox has posted on Firebug Lite for Dojo and shows how he has taken it beyond console.log().
I was most excited about the DOM inspector:

Yes, I did say that a DOM inspector would imitate existing tools. However, I implemented this for a colleague who was struggling with a particularly nasty IE 6.0 bug one day (more like one month), …

jQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, MooTools, and Dojo

Pete Higgins of Dojo has created a nice example, dojo.workers, that puts together coverflow with Dijit and some dojo.query animations.
He even takes out his frustrations with IE 6 as he creates a branch that looks like this PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:

var newp = function(){

 // IE6 branch of this demo

 window.location.href = “http://” +

  …

Eugene Lazutkin has written a very thorough post on dojox.lang.aspect a module that takes AOP seriously in JavaScript.
As someone who has been to a couple AOSDs (the AOP software conference) and was excited to see AOP on the scene, it is good to see someone who gets it working on the JavaScript side.
Of course, we all get the interception …

Craig Riecke, Rawld Gill, and Alex Russell, along with the Pragmatic Programmers themselves have been kind enough to give the Ajaxian community some exclusive extracts from the Mastering Dojo beta book.
What do we have on the docket?
First, we have details on the Dojo DOM Apis. Specifically, the author takes us through a challenge involving …

Mike Wilcox has started a nice series of posts on porting Dojo methods to Flash as a homage for Open Screen (aside: I applaud Adobe’s intentions, but need to see a non-assert of their IP before I can do anything with it.)
In part one of the series Mike ports dojo.hitch to ActionScript:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:

_global.lang = {

    …

Sam Foster has written up an example of using Dojo to create directory listings with keyboard shortcuts.
You can now tab over to the box on the top right, and filter your selections:

This tutorial shows you how to upgrade those plain vanilla pages to make getting around a little faster and along …

As John Resig reports, the Japanese Shibuja.JS user group managed to port (at least in parts) the Java Virtual Machine over to JavaScript. The project is called Orto and there is a Japanese PDF explaining the details (I guess) available on John’s site.
Using this you can convert Java code into bytecode and embed it in the …

Simon Willison pointed out the part of the HTML 5 spec that discusses a way to add attributes to HTML elements for your own needs via data-.
For example, a spaceship for a game:
PLAIN TEXT
HTML:

<div class=”spaceship” data-id=”92432″

     data-weapons=”laser 2″ data-shields=”50%”

     data-x=”30″ data-y=”10″ data-z=”90″>

 <button class=”fire”

         onclick=”spaceships[this.parentNode.dataset.id].fire()”>

  Fire

 </button>

</div>

Every HTML element may …

Neil Roberts goes into the XHR Plugins that Dojo uses and how you can extend the system to have your own.
If you look at dojo.xhrGet you will see “Acceptable values are: text (default), json, json-comment-optional, json-comment-filtered, javascript, xml”, but:

What you may not know is that the handleAs parameter is merely a way of specifying what plugin to use. …

A plugin designed to make it easier to use the dojo toolkit javascript library with your rails application.

Alex Russell has written up some of the features of Dojo 1.1 that may not shout out at you in the release notes:

Core
I should mention a couple of Core features from 1.1 that might otherwise go overlooked, though. The first is a lack of visible change. Dojo Core and Dijit from 1.1 are fully backwards compatible with 1.0. …

The Chandler Project, an open source, standards-based information manager, has upgraded their OSS PIM to use Dojo v1.0.2. The upgrade has provided for improved performance and extended the UI capabilities via Dojo’s user interface building API, Dijit.
The first changes I’m excited about are, like our latest release, less wholesale modifications than improvements and commitments to stable APIs …

Above is the breakdown from the Dojo distribution. Peter Higgins was working on an AIR application using the new Dojo AIR integration and wanted to do a better job at stripping down the Dojo build for what he needed.
He ended up with a set of scripts to create a custom build nicely which includes:

Nuking all of …

Brendan Eich has responded to Doug Crockford talking about the popularity of JavaScript, and the hash method for sharing JavaScript, in his post on Popularity.
In in he starts out by discussing the history of JavaScript, warped as it may be:

As I’ve often said, and as others at Netscape can confirm, I was recruited
to Netscape with the promise …

The Dojo team has released version 1.1 which includes from over 800 improvements:

An easy to use and significantly improved Dojo API Viewer with some seriously great features, including the ability to easily find the original definition of a method that is “mixed-in”
A growing collection of demos, tutorials, and articles
A new BorderContainer Dijit, which is a much better …