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!
Posted in Dojo, JavaScript, Performance, ajax, browsers, debugging | 31 Comments
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.
Tags: Flash ActionScript Dojo JavaScript connect
Posted in Dojo, JavaScript, News, Open Source, ajax, api | No Comments
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.
Posted in Dojo, Open Source, Vector Graphics, ajax | 6 Comments
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());
Tags: json-rpc java rpc
Posted in Dojo, JavaScript, ajax | 11 Comments
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).
Tags: ecmascript, ecmascript 4, es4, java, jruby, jython, python
Posted in JavaScript, thoughts | 4 Comments
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.
Tags: Flash ActionScript
Posted in Dojo, JavaScript, News, Open Source, ajax, api | No Comments
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.
Tags: Flash ActionScript
Posted in Dojo, JavaScript, News, Open Source, ajax, api | 2 Comments