We’re pleased to announce the two latest projects from SitePen Labs: Paver and Persevere!

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Navigating a mobile app can be slow, especially on long pages and slow scrolling phones. Fortunately the xhtml mobile profile markup language supported by mobile phones provides a solution to finding links and starting phone calls inside the mobile browser.

accesskey

Adding the accesskey attribute to link a lets users “click” on that link by simply pressing a number on their phone’s keypad. Valid values for accesskey can be 0-9,#, and * (all of the keys on a standard phone keypad). Displaying which key will activate a link is up to the application as most phones won’t tell the user that a link has an access key. Web site designers currently need to decide on a consistent way to inform users that an access key is associated with a given link. Most apps will use ordered lists where the order of the links corresponds with the access keys. Putting the number in brackets inside or next to the link is another way to denote the accesskey.

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In March, we introduced the SitePen Support service to provide high-quality support for Dojo, DWR and Cometd from the people who know those projects inside and out.

We’re always watching to see how we can make our services better and after listening to our early support clients we’re making changes to ensure that clients are successful with the products we support.

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Recently I was writing a “tips and tricks” blog post that was going to focus on the idea that it is better to use an object as a “string buffer”; the idea was that by passing this object around to various functions and pushing string fragments into it, you can get better performance from a JavaScript engine. My friend and colleague Alex Russell challenged me to show him hard data supporting this hypothesis—and the results were quite eye-opening!

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This is the final part of our three part series on porting Dojo methods to Flash.

In part one of our series, we implemented Dojo’s hitch method, and then used hitch in part two, where we made our connect method. In part three, we will be using both of these methods as we connect a JavaScript object to a Flash object.

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In the course of the last two months I have been talking to people about dojox.charting changes. I collected a lot of wishes, valuable feedback, and even some great patches introducing new exciting features. But in order to accommodate suggestions and planned features, we need to reorganize the codebase. The reorganization was looming and its time has come. This week I was going over Dojo charting trac tickets and the roadmap.

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Dojo supports JSON-RPC, which is an easy to use JSON-based remote method call format. JSON-RPC can be utilized for an interoperable approach to distributed computing and communicating with servers. We will look at an example of interacting with Java on the server and invoking a Java method from JavaScript using Dojo’s RPC services. We will be begin by demonstrating a simple JSON-RPC handler written in Java. First we will create a servlet and write a POST handler that will read the content from the request:

public class JsonRPC extends HttpServlet {
    protected void doPost(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) 
		throws ServletException, IOException {
         String content = streamToString(req.getInputStream());

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Mark Ramm-Christensen posed some questions about using the JVM as a platform for dynamic languages. Many people do, in fact, use dynamic languages on the JVM (Groovy, Beanshell, Rhino, Jython, JRuby are some big ones… and don’t forget Scala, Nice and other “non-dynamic” languages that target the JVM). But Java the platform has not gotten widespread or serious attention until recently (witness the recent resurgence of Jython, the rise of JRuby and the coming of the Da Vinci Machine).

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Adobe recently announced their new Open Screen project, which opens the licensing of the Flash Player and much more.

We’re celebrating this event with a three part series on Dojo and ActionScript and previewing some of the work by the Dojo team.

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There’s been some breaking news from Adobe, announcing their Open Screen project. As of today, they are opening the licensing of the Flash Player, FLV/F4V video, publishing the AMF protocol and device APIs for the player, and more.

This is great news for businesses, developers, and the Open Web in general. No longer does open source ActionScript code need to do workarounds and leave things out in an effort to make it “as open as reasonably possible”.

In celebration of this announcement, we’re beginning our three part series on ActionScript code, and preview some of the Dojo team’s efforts in this area.

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