Last week, we reviewed the basic capabilities of the Dojo Grid by exploring the world of gaskets by creating a simple gasket lookup application. This week, we’ll extend that application with some requests from the fictional president, “Bob”, of our fictional gasket company. Let’s get started!

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The Dojo Toolkit is now an official release and we’re talking about new and changed features. In my previous post, I demonstrated Dijit’s brand new ability to construct widgets in markup. Now we’ll return to the more familiar Dijit Widget and see the culmination of the previous Dojo Toolkit betas.

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Google released the first preview of Android today. It is chock full of features and a great emulator, but there was one interesting omission.

Beyond what has been covered elsewhere, there are many attention grabbing features for mobile app developers:

• XMPP in the application stack, giving applications access to low-latency event driven messaging
• Location data (via GPS or cell-tower triangulation) accessible by applications
• SQLite for local data storage
• Applications can provide services to other applications… no need for 10 different photo taking apps

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This week Eye-Fi launched the Eye-Fi Card combining wifi with a 2GB flash memory card, and we couldn’t be more excited for everyone to get their hands on it. With Eye-Fi, your photos can be automatically sent to any number of popular online photo services (Shutterfly, Flickr, Facebook, SmugMug, etc.) and to your computer all via wifi. No need to dock your camera, sync the photos to your computer and then upload your photos to the various photo services. Just configure the wifi and start taking pictures! It’s that easy!

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You’ve probably heard of Kevin from his work on the TurboGears Python web framework. We’re fans of that work and his approach with TurboGears, namely taking great components and integrating, documenting, and polishing them for real-world use. Needless to say, he’s a great fit for SitePen’s pragmatic approach to solving client problems.

Kevin’s interests are broad, his experience deep, and his perspective already proving invaluable to our team. Like many of the great people at SitePen, look for him to be blogging in this space in the future.

We’re excited about the release of Dojo 1.0. In honor of the new release, I’m starting a series on one of the newest additions to the Dojo mix: the Dojo Grid.

When demonstrating Dojo, I prefer tying examples to real-world scenarios. Imagine for a moment that we work at a company that produces gaskets out of sheet material. Each of these gaskets has a part number, a minimum temperature rating, a maximum temperature rating, and maximum pressure rating. Each of these attributes needs to be a column so they can be displayed and sorted so customers can find the information they need in a timely manner. Let’s take a look at how the data looks:

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Chris Mitchell of IBM had a few days of free time prior to the Dojo 1.0 release, and so he added Canvas support for dojox.gfx. While Canvas does not offer all of the DOM goodness of SVG, it does have one key features: it works today on the iPhone. While we expect the iPhone’s version of Safari to be updated to support SVG for vector graphics and charting very soon, it allows us to draw and chart natively on the iPhone now:

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Last night, we helped put the finishing touches on Dojo 1.0. 3 1/2 years in the making, we’re extremely pleased to reach this great milestone. The Dojo community has done an amazing job this year, completely rewriting everything with a focus on performance, speed, ease of development, and amazing user experience.

Recent advancements in Dojo include:

• Accessibility including keyboard navigation, low vision support, and ARIA markup for assistive technologies
• High performance grid widget supporting 100,000+ rows of data
• Browser-native 2-D and 3-D charting
• A full library of easy-to-use, attractive UI controls
• Universal data access for simple and fast data-driven widget development
• Internationalization with localizations provided for 13 major languages
• CSS-driven themes to make customization and extension simple
• Dojo Offline, based on Google Gears, which makes offline applications easy to build
• Support for the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits
• Native 2-D and 3-D vector graphics drawing
• Access to many more widgets and extensions through the Dojo package system

Read more at the Dojo 1.0 press release.

The first Dojo Toolkit 1.0 Release Candidate is complete. To celebrate, let’s take a look at one of the new features in Dijit’s dijit.Declaration.

We are already familiar with Dijit’s capabilities to render widgets in markup. This is a powerful way of providing widgets in your page with about the same effort as styling with CSS. Recently, Alex Russell blogged about new Dojo alternate script types as a way of attaching code via markup through a creative use of the script tag’s type attribute. One of the newest features in the Dojo Toolkit, dijit.Declaration, extends that approach by giving us a way to define widgets in markup.

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