As mentioned in Zooming, Scrolling, and Panning in Dojo Charting, our next goal to tackle was charting events. I am happy to announce that event support for Charting has landed in the Dojo trunk, and shipped with Dojo 1.2. It was the most requested dojox.charting feature, and I am excited that it is finally here!

(more…)

One of the difficulties implementing Comet on Java is the lack of any acknowledgement in the current Servlet spec (v2.5) that any HTTP connection may be anything other than short-lived. Unlike many of the other components in the JavaEE stack, servlets are ubiquitous so we don't really have a choice to use an alternative.

Servlet version 3.0 is in the works, several of the people that blog at Comet Daily are on the Servlet spec expert group and want to see this oversight fixed, but it will be a while before the spec is done, and even longer before we can rely on it’s support everywhere.

(more…)

Using the Dojo Toolkit with the Zend Framework is now a lot easier. Today Zend announced their partnership with Dojo to deliver “out-of-the-box Ajax and rich user interfaces for sites developed in Zend Framework”.

For the initial release with this integration in place, focus is on the following areas:

JSON-RPC Server

Zend’s JSON server now supports JSON-RPC, which makes it easy to work with Dojo, which supports both the 1.0 final and 2.0 draft specifications of JSON-RPC (thanks in no small part to the hard work of SitePen’s Dustin Machi and Kris Zyp).

(more…)

In my previous post on the Dojo Object Harness (DOH), I discussed how to write unit tests for custom code in custom places. Alex and Dylan both suggested that I write a follow up post describing how to write asynchronous tests. Lets skip the formalities, and get right to it.

The easiest tests (the synchronous ones) are easy to understand. They simply contain one or more functions that exercise a test condition and then (or while) evaluate the results of the exercises to see if they match a an expected value. For example,

(more…)

MAMP is an easy way to get a basic MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment running. Each package in the stack is configured such that it’s easy to drop the MAMP directory into /Applications and serve up a database-backed PHP site.

(more…)

As mentioned in my previous post Dojo Charting Reorganization, this week I worked on zooming, scrolling, and panning of charts. It turned out to be a more complex task than I anticipated due to the little-known fact that Dojo Charting can stack multiple plots per chart and can show multiple independent axes on all 4 sides of the chart. These problems were solved and a new API was introduced on the chart object:

(more…)

The 1.2 release of the Dojo Toolkit is focused on the overall Look and Feel. Patches have been landing thick and fast to tighten up the visual polish. Most you might be hard-pressed to notice at first glance, but the devil is always in the details, and for a toolkit with the promise and scope of Dojo we have to sweat the small stuff.

Take Dijit’s toolbar buttons. In the editor, you have a row of graphical buttons for bold, italic, etc. For some time the rendering in Firefox has been inconsistent with the other browsers - there’s some extra space around the buttons. The result is that the toolbar is a little wider, and it’s just not tight.

(more…)

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

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)