When conducting Dojo training courses, we’ve found it to be very valuable to go beyond simple code snippets to demonstrate APIs, patterns, and other key concepts. Snippets and demos are useful, but they often lack a very important quality: context. Nothing beats having a full application in front of you—with code available to read and modify as you learn the ropes—so we built the Dojo Sensei Reader, a rich, powerful RSS reader realized as a single-page web application.

(more…)

A very useful feature of Dojo is the dojox.data.ServiceStore data store. It allows you to layer a dojo.data API on top of any web service, opening up a world of uses from your own client-side components. Kris Zyp briefly mentioned the topic in his recent article on JsonRestStore, and the past couple of weeks have seen a bunch of refinements to the component to get it ready for next month’s Dojo 1.2 release. Let’s take a quick look at how to make it work with the web service of your choice.

(more…)

Most anyone who’s looked at the feature list knows that one of Dojo’s core features is a drag and drop framework. What’s not immediately obvious is that Dojo actually has two drag and drop APIs. The first, dojo.dnd, is designed to manage the process of dragging items between two or more containers, including multiple selection, item acceptance filtering on drop targets, and other behavioral tweaks. The second API, dojo.dnd.move, is a bit lower-level in scope; it’s designed to manage the process of moving single objects around, without the concept of attaching items to containers. Both of these are very useful features to have at your disposal. In this article, we’ll cover dojo.dnd.

(more…)

MAMP is an easy way to get a basic MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment running. Each package in the stack is configured such that it’s easy to drop the MAMP directory into /Applications and serve up a database-backed PHP site.

(more…)

A lot of my work involves 3rd party API integration. We have plenty of tools at our disposal: protocols like SOAP, XML-RPC, JSON-RPC, and conventions like RESTful URI schemes. You would think it’d be a no-brainer to hook services together. Not always.

I was recently writing some code that called an XML-RPC method to retrieve logging data for an external service. The method signature itself was simple (names changed to protect the, all right, for the heck of it):

log(id, start, end)

(more…)