I’m excited to announce a new BSD-licensed project created by SitePen and co-sponsored by Adobe: Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR.

This new effort creates a new namespace, dair, making it even easier to create rich desktop apps, such as the Dojo Toolbox, using the Dojo Toolkit and Adobe AIR.

The extensions offer convenience methods for your application, wrapping many common AIR Patterns in Dojo-like constructors and providing an entire framework from which to grow. Built-in persistent storage, granular window control from creation to destruction, Window FX, Audio/Video helpers, and extra console debugging facilities are just the beginning.

This work was greatly inspired by our creation of the Dojo Toolbox. It simplifies Ajax application development on the AIR platform for not only Dojo users, but also anyone creating an Ajax application inside AIR. Thanks again to Adobe for helping make this possible.

I’ll be speaking in more detail about this on the afternoon of Monday, November 17th at Adobe MAX in San Francisco.

Visit the Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR project page for full details, including a screencast, downloads, examples, documentation, and of course the source code and information on getting involved. Of course, if you need help creating a great AIR-based desktop app, contact us for more information on how we can assist you.

The Dojo Toolkit has been around for over four years, and has undergone significant changes, both big and small, in becoming a great JavaScript toolkit. This article debunks myth and outdated assumptions (both fair and false) applied to Dojo over its four plus years of development.

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SitePen recently returned from Beantown, the host city to this year’s Dojo Developer Day (DDD) and The Ajax Experience, the largest annual conference dedicated to Ajax development. SitePenners in attendance included Joe Walker, Kris Zyp, Tom Trenka, Peter Higgins, and Alex Russell, all of whom must be applauded for their great presentations at both events. Kudos to all!

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A few weeks ago, some of the guys at SitePen were commenting that I was using Flash on my personal web site for a Flickr Badge. I responded that if Dojo had similar functionality, I would easily replace the badge. A couple of weeks later, Peter Higgins and Bryan Forbes of SitePen rose to the task and created dojox.image.FlickrBadge.

This weekend I had a chance to put their work to the test, and I’m impressed. Using the new Flickr badge is quite easy:

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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).

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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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