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

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At SitePen, we’re dedicated to creating excellent user experiences and writing clean, beautiful code. Because of this, we’ve earned a reputation as being advocates, advisers and teachers to our friends, colleagues, and clients. As most people know, we’re also the creators, contributors and avid proponents of Dojo, THE JavaScript toolkit being endorsed by IBM, AOL, Sun Microsystems, and many, many more. It is truly, a 100% open source (BSD or AFL) technology that is absolutely free with no tricky licensing issues or EXTensive legal jargon.

Dojo’s thriving developer community and fortune 500 backing makes it the right choice for reputable and responsible companies who are also dedicated to best development practices. For developers and organizations just getting started, here’s our “FREE Top 10 and 100% FREE Dojo FREE Resource List!”

1. Dojo API Viewer. A full-featured API documentation tool, generated from source code comments and documentation. Features include simple navigation, complete listings of an object’s fields, clear definitions of a field’s type, clear ancestry paths on a field, function parameters, source and examples.
2. The Dojo Book. An online culmination of extensive examples and detailed explanations about all things Dojo, authored by dozens of Dojo community members.
3. The Dojo Forums. A community support resource for your learning and research efforts, without thousands of answers to Dojo questions.
4. The #dojo IRC channel on irc.freenode.net is the place to chat live with contributors and users of Dojo.
5. Dojo Campus. An up and coming site that contains a collection of articles and demos about Dojo, as well as a feature-explorer showing off the capabilities of Dojo.
6. Dojo Community Blogs. Popular Dojo blogs include the official Dojo blog, Planet Dojo, SitePen blog, and Ajaxian’s Dojo category.
7. Dojo Trac. View open and recently fixed tickets, and easily browse the Dojo source tree using Dojo’s Trac instance. Because of Dojo’s very open nature, every code commit, ticket request, and comment can be viewed through Trac.
8. Dojo Key Links. A reviewed collection of current and up to date tutorials, demos, and articles about Dojo.
9. Dojo Presentations. SlideShare hosts a variety of conference slides from recent Dojo presentations.
10. SitePen’s Dojo QuickStart Guide. This is our brand new, concise, easy-to-follow tutorial for getting up to speed quickly with the Dojo Toolkit.

Getting started with Dojo has never been easier and SitePen is always available to lend a helping hand! We offer Dojo training workshops, commercial Dojo support packages and of course, premier design and development services, brought to you by the best open source, web company around.

At SitePen, we value amazing user experiences. Once in a while, you see an elegant solution to a problem that has annoyed users for years.

For most consumer web sites and web applications, logging a user out of a service after a certain amount of inactivity is not very important, and does more to annoy a user than anything else. In the enterprise or when using bank web sites, security is a far greater concern, and most services resort to logging users out automatically after 15 or 30 minutes of inactivity. This is especially frustrating for users of advanced web apps, which might require several clicks to restore the user interface back to the state it was in before the session timed out.

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Since Dojo 1.1 was released a week ago, several outlets have published articles:

• Dojo 1.1 Refines Ajax Development - Features SitePen’s Peter Higgins and Alex Russell with their thoughts on Dojo 1.1, and a comprehensive summary of what’s new with the 1.1 release
• Dojo Stabilizes Open Source Ajax Toolkit - Mentions Dojo backing from IBM, Sun, AOL and Nexaweb, and gives a summary of IBM and Nexaweb’s opinions of Dojo 1.1
• Dojo Encourages Ajax Innovation - The facts aren’t particularly solid in this one, but it’s still nice to see Dojo get mentioned
• Adobe AIR for Linux - Mentions Dojo working on AIR
• What’s new with Google Gears - Includes a short section about Dojo Storage and the Gears Dojo data provider

We’re pleased to announce the release of the Dojo Toolkit 1.1. Significant progress has been made with this release, including:

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As people are becoming more interested in Comet, “which Comet implementation should I use?” is becoming a common question.

At Comet Daily, we recently had a post comparing the maturity of various Comet implementations. From this, we came up with the idea of a Comet Comparison Guide to make it easy to learn about the major differences between implementations. We still have to add information about the Comet servers not developed by the contributors to Comet Daily. Once finished, we hope to have the definitive source for quickly comparing the options available for implementing Comet.

We’re very excited about our new commercial support offering for the Dojo Toolkit, DWR, and Cometd. So what is SitePen Support and what do we have to offer?

Advice

When getting started with something different or new, there’s rarely documentation or a tutorial that addresses things in quite the right way. As such, we offer unlimited advice as part of most of our support packages. This is especially useful when you don’t quite know the right question to ask, or what the best approach is to solve a problem.

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There was a lot of activity in the Dojo Toolkit community this week, including an update for Dojo Storage plus articles on productivity and writing DRYer code.

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Joe was recently interviewed by InfoQ about DWR 3.0 as a preview of his presentation on Comet and DWR at QCon. Key points about DWR 3.0 include:

• Offline Support (Google Gears and/or Dojo Offline)
• TIBCO General Interface integration
• Aptana Jaxer integration
• OpenAjax Hub, PubSub, Bayeux, etc.
• A June release is planned

SitePen was in the news recently:

Simplexity Rising: Web usability reveals itself to be a game of hide-and-seek covers our session, “Your Mom, 2.0″, for the upcoming SXSW 2008, and offers some choice quotes about building web apps that are feature rich yet easy to use. At this session, we’ll be discussing the things that make an app that’s easy for Mom to use but still delivers the features everyone wants to use. The format is somewhat of a round-table discussion, and we’ve invited a few local Austin Moms to attend. We’ll also present the results of a survey of Moms, and see where this open discussion takes us.

Developers Seek Web, Dynamic Languages is a summary of a recent developer survey, noting the rise in interest of Ajax among other things. Our Research & Development Director Alex Russell explains why dynamic languages are becoming so popular: increasing CPU power puts greater emphasis on developer efficiency. Dynamic languages like Ruby, Python, and PHP are “just riding the complexity versus CPU power curves.” It’s not just a matter of letting people bang out apps in 30 minutes—when you worry less about the infrastructure, you get to spend more time on features and design.

The article mentions a number of advantages to web apps—easy deployment, painless updates, huge reach—plus one of our favorites: openness. As proponents of the Open Web, our investments in research and development of open source web tools and technologies make it easier for you to deliver great user experiences, even for Your Mom.