This is it folks! This is the last week of dev for Dojo Offline until we pop the Dojo Offline beta out the door, either later this week or on Monday, April 16th.

Last Week

Last week we finished the Windows installer for Dojo Offline. It comes out to about only 300K! No multi-megabyte download runtimes here. We also continued to fix QA bugs with an eye to the beta launch. The Mac OS X installer was also worked on.

This Week

This is the big week! We will finish the Mac OS X installer, fix important QA bugs that remain and get things into a shippable state, write up good docs, and get a Dojo Offline beta out the door.

The following week, on Tuesday, April 17th, SitePen and Brad Neuberg will be giving the first public presentation on Dojo Offline and creating offline enabled web apps on the open web. The session is at 4:50 PM at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Last Week

We finished a bunch of big tasks last week, mostly having to do with fit and finish and our installers:

* The Moxie demo for Dojo Offline used to take too long to load — it was loading about 27 resources on page load — we optimized this to about 3 resources on page load drastically improving page load time.
* We created about 80% of a Windows installer using an open source toolkit from Microsoft called WiX. Unfortunately, WiX
turns out to make easy things hard and hard things close to impossible, trying to turn XML into a programming language. We abandoned using WiX.
* Instead of WiX, we started back over with NSIS, the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System. NSIS turns out to be far better for our tasks, and the installer for Windows is almost over. This installer does alot on installation, such as autoconfiguring the available browsers to use our PAC file, keeping a reference to older proxy settings so they can be reset on uninstallation, starting the Dojo Offline proxy up on system startup, etc.
* Dojo Offline development was being done on the head of Subversion, but the head is changing too drastically for a planned deep overhaul of Dojo. Instead, we branched from the 0.4.2 branch to a new Dojo Offline branch and migrated everything over. All Dojo Offline development is now happening on this branch.

This Week

Expect to see the Windows installer done this week, automatic restarts done this week (if the proxy crashes for some reason), and the Mac installer done. Also, anyone who would love to volunteer with QA by testing the installers, uninstallers, and Moxie please email me: bkn3@columbia.edu