Last month, we announced Queued, an open-source application for managing your Netflix Queue. Queued is a desktop application created with web technologies and techniques including the Dojo Toolkit, and it is distributed as an Adobe AIR application to provide several performance boosting benefits from living on the desktop.

At SitePen, we help our clients build great web applications. Most are not available for public consumption as they live behind company firewalls and/or require licensing. On the other hand, Queued is free and open-source software, BSD-licensed, and hosted on Google Code.

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SitePen and uxebu are pleased to announce their first joint Dojo workshop in Munich, Germany. Come join some of the co-creators of Dojo on the 7th and 8th of May, 2009 to learn how to build great web sites and applications with Dojo. This new workshop will be an engaging experience for anyone wanting to learn more about Dojo!

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Silicon Valley Web Builder has a series of monthly panels on topics of interest to web application developers. I had the opportunity to attend a pair of events recently, once as a speaker, once as an attendee, and the contrast between the two was intriguing. The first panel in November was focused on Comet, while the most recent panel was a comparison of Ajax toolkits.

As an attendee of the Comet panel, I found the discussion interesting, but was a bit disheartening and negative. In retrospect, the negative tone reflects the pain and disappointment Comet engineers face in trying to come up with the perfect solution for low-latency data transit across the wire. Michael Carter was the lone optimist, describing the work he has done to date with Orbited, and what the HTML5 WebSocket promises to bring us in the near future. The other panelists were not as optimistic, having been burned by specifications not adopted and the ongoing frustrations with HTTP connection limits, proxy configurations, flaky internet connections, and more—all of which prevent many of the better approaches to Comet being viable.

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With the proliferation of real web browsers on mobile devices (iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Nokia), an increasing number of browsers (Chrome) or browser-like platforms (AIR, Titanium, Jaxer), portal standards for widgets and gadgets (Caja, AdSafe, work by the OpenAjax Alliance, and much more), are the days numbered for a JavaScript toolkit that uses the same code base across all platforms without a compile step numbered?

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As 2008 wraps up, there are a number of announcements and noteworthy items surrounding Dojo, DWR, Persevere, and SitePen services.

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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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