Recently the long-anticipated Safari 4.0 was released. The earlier WebKit was already fast, but this version performs just insanely well. Reloading a page on your local host takes milliseconds as I showed in my last post. Even more importantly, Safari 4.0 comes with a new inspector which includes all the functionality of Firebug, although it’s still not quite as good as Firebug. It doesn’t have the error handling ability, especially for the in-memory Dojo JavaScript files that are initiated with XHR eval. I still use Firefox primarily for development, but I find myself using Safari more and more often, as I just can’t resist the almost instantaneous refreshing of the page.
Author Archive
Hacking Safari’s Inspector
Thursday, August 13th, 2009Web Page Global Variable Performance
Monday, August 10th, 2009Google recently released a new feature for their Google Docs writing application; the ability to draw a vector graphic and insert it in your document. This drawing module uses SVG and VML, much like DojoX GFX. I was curious about their code and explored with Firebug. To my surprise, I found that most of their code uses variables in the global scope. The code is compressed, but when observing with Firebug’s DOM tab, there are several pages and a few hundred lines of global variables.
Stocker: Advanced Dojo Made Easy
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009SitePen is excited to announce Stocker, which demonstrates some of the more advanced capabilities of Dojo, including the newly released DataChart, the DataGrid, Data Store, Comet, Persevere, and BorderContainer. SitePen is also offering a one-day workshop where you will learn how to create Stocker yourself, but I’m here to give you a sneak peak of what Stocker is and how it works.
Stocker uses these technologies to emulate a stock monitoring application. We’re using made up data, but that’s actually more interesting. The Persevere server generates new stock items at certain intervals, and then pushes them to the browser with Comet. Then the Data Store updates its items and triggers an onSet notification. The DataGrid and DataChart are both connected to the same store, and are listening to that event. They then update their displays and show the stock items and their latest data.
Introducing DojoX DataChart
Monday, March 30th, 2009The latest addition in the Dojo 1.3 release is the new dojox.charting class, DataChart. Its primary purpose is to make connecting a chart to a Data Store a simple process. There are also other benefits with DataChart: less parameters are needed to create a basic chart, and more defaults and convenience methods get you up and running quickly with Dojox Charting.
Queued: API Challenges
Thursday, March 26th, 2009SitePen’s new Queued application works very well with the Netflix API, but the smoothness of this functionality was the result of a lot of research, and trial and error. In fact, this experience led me to propose that future project timelines should budget extra time when working with an unfamiliar API—and even more time when that API is brand new and untested. Netflix released one of the more exciting APIs in recent months and SitePen began to work with it right away. The Netflix team did great work on their API and they were also very helpful with us when we had questions or there was a bug on their end. I can imagine the challenges of setting up a (Netflix) REST API with an existing system and a large and complex library of items was not simple. Integration with the Netflix API presented its own set of challenges to us.
Styling Dijit Form Elements
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
Dijit has a tremendous wealth of high quality and feature-rich form elements providing key functionality including validation, time calculation, spinner controls, calendars, and much more. Furthermore, Dijit gives you a set of themes to choose from: Tundra, Soria, Noir, and Nihilo.
Dojo Search with Yahoo BOSS
Friday, February 20th, 2009
The new Dojo Search is now live. I worked on creating this with the goal of showing how much information there is out there about the Dojo Toolkit and supplying a way to aggregate that information in a central location. Now you can search all of Dojo’s Resources instead of dojotoolkit.org alone. Most of the time if you have a question, it’s already been asked and answered!
The Dojo community is large and there is a lot of great information spread out across the vastness of the web. The Dojo Toolkit has been around for a while and has undergone numerous additions and improvements since its inception. Unfortunately, some of the documentation and valuable data needed by users and enthusiasts is decentralized. Dojo Search is designed to help alleviate this problem.
Debugging Adobe AIR Applications Using The Dojo Toolkit
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009In a previous post I provided the steps to get you up and running with Adobe AIR. I’ll continue with the debugging features available in AIR and the Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR (dAIR). The Adobe AIR Introspector is a Firebug-like console that logs messages and has code inspectors. Its logging capability is good, but it’s made even better with code in the dair namespace.
Getting Started with Adobe AIR
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009As previously announced by Dylan Schiemann, SitePen has released the Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR (dAIR) project that help make it simple to use Dojo into an AIR application. These extensions also simplify some of the more difficult AIR APIs by wrapping them and adding some syntactic sugar.
Working with Adobe AIR is a real treat for a web developer. You get to work with desktop features such as native drag and drop, system icons, reading and writing files, an encrypted SQLite database, and chrome-less, non-rectangular windows (even with HTML!). You also have access to all of the features of Flash, like audio and video, sound transforms, uploads and downloads, byte arrays, and Pixel Bender. Best of all, you get to have a single target environment, in WebKit — CSS3 selectors and styling, a super-fast JavaScript engine, and no compatibility issues with a certain browser.
Adobe worked hard at making desktop applications easy and accessible for web developers. I’ll explain the steps to get your development environment setup.
DojoX FileUploader Upgrade to Support Flash 10
Monday, December 1st, 2008I’ve just completed the upgrade of the DojoX FileUploader to make it compatible with Flash Player 10. The FileUploader widget allows for the uploading of more than one file at a time, which is surprisingly still not supported natively by any web browser on the market today.
In Flash versions 8 and 9, a file upload Browse Dialog could be launched using JavaScript code. Users could click an HTML button, which would call a JavaScript function behind the scenes, communicate with a Flash (SWF) file, which would then trigger the browse() method in the SWF. The latest Flash Player has a security feature where the user must click within a Flash-based portion of the user interface to launch the Browse Dialog. This change is to prevent malicious code from continually opening the dialog without user interaction. Working toward this upgrade was a major undertaking that involved a significant rewrite of FileUploader. The results are a success, and in addition to working with the tightened security policies, it was a great opportunity to add many new features:
- Degradable
- CDN Support (see below for cross-domain restriction details)
- POST Data Support
- Custom Field Name Support
- Full Event Support
- Exposed CSS Positioning
- Dialog Container Detection
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