Archive for December, 2009

Dojo 1.4 Released!

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Dojo 1.4 is hot off the presses, with more than seven months of significant improvements to performance, stability, and features.

Of particular interest:

  • IO Pipeline topics
  • dojo.cache
  • dojo.contentHandlers
  • dojo.hash with native HTML5 onhashchange event support where available
  • Traversal and manipulation for NodeLists (the return value for dojo.query)
  • dojo.ready (easier to type than dojo.addOnLoad)
  • Hundreds of refinements to the Dijit API and collection of Dijits, and a few new widgets in DojoX
  • DataChart widget and other improvements to charting
  • dojox.drawing lands!
  • Editor improvements and new plug-ins in both Dijit and DojoX
  • Grid is faster, and the EnhancedGrid lands!
  • ForestStoreModel for the TreeGrid
  • GFX improvements
  • dojox.jq, a very experimental module aimed at trying to match the jQuery API as close as possible, but using Dojo underneath
  • Dojo build system optionally supports the Google Closure Tools compiler
  • Significant speed improvements, especially in IE

Read the full Dojo 1.4 release notes for more details! And thanks to everyone in the Dojo community that helped make this release great!

Posted in Dojo, JavaScript, Open Source, Vector Graphics | 2 Comments

Convergence of Chrome OS and Android?

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Google recently was asked about something we have suspected: Android and Chrome OS may converge. From our perspective, Android and Chrome OS both offer compelling opportunities for building great web apps, but having two distinct operating systems from Google, each with different approaches to development, just adds complexity and confusion to the overall development landscape. Of course, it still bothers us that iPhone apps and Dashboard widgets aren’t interoperable.

Android has the first mover advantage of being deployed today to many devices, but to really get the most out of it, you really should develop using Java, or employ a toolkit like PhoneGap. Chrome OS offers the promise of using web technologies that are popular today, but is not yet production-ready, or optimized for mobile devices like Palm’s webOS.

The long-term expected convergence from Google makes sense. Convergence of Palm’s webOS with Chrome OS makes sense to us as well as they are both pushing towards having a very similar WebKit-based operating system for delivering web applications. Palm already appears to be moving in the direction of converging with Chrome through their adoption of key technologies in webOS such as Google’s V8 JavaScript engine. There’s nothing confirming that this will happen, other than it just making sense.

While there is a lot of short term interest in apps, you can still get significant results from mobile web apps, and the gap between a native app and a web-based app will quickly shrink, as evidenced by apps like Pie Guy. After all, web apps don’t require app store approval!

Posted in Open Source, browsers, thoughts | No Comments

Gears is Dead? Long live Gears!

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

It was recently reported that Google Dumps Gears for HTML5. If true, with the investment Google has made in HTML5, Chrome, Chrome OS, and Chrome Frame, this is not surprising, but it does leave a potential short-term gap for offline application development.

In their post, Read-Write Web asks if offline access is even necessary any longer. I guess they don’t spend enough time on airplanes or at hotels and conferences with poor internet connectivity! It’s certainly necessary, and while other browsers have developed significant offline capabilities, older browsers still need a plug-in like Gears.

In the interim, what should you do if you want an offline application? Do you develop for Gears and HTML 5 features? Do you wait for Chrome Frame to integrate offline capabilities? Do you use a toolkit like Dojo which will wrap the various possibilities? Or do you rely on something else like AIR, Titanium, Prism, or Fluid? The answer really depends on your application. If it is live now, you plan for the future but you keep going with Gears and/or Dojo Offline. If you won’t be launching for some time, you may want to talk to us about your offline app options.

At the end of the day, Gears is open source. If there’s a long-term need for its existence, the community can pick it up and run with it! Thankfully end-of-life isn’t the certain death-knell that it is with closed-source software.

Posted in Open Source, browsers, offline | 4 Comments