In Part I of Queued and AIR issues, I talked about some of the challenges we faced during the development of Queued, our AIR application that allows you to manage your Netflix queues. In this post, I’ll discuss five other issues we ran across.

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During the course of developing Queued, we ran across a number of challenges developing with AIR that we needed to solve. Some were very difficult to get around, while others were the result of our team needing to think outside the web-based paradigm. In this post, I’ll talk about four issues we ran across that ended up shaping part of the Queued codebase.

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As web applications, services and mashups evolve, a perennial problem begins to assert itself—the issue of authorization (or in layman’s terms, making sure both application and service know who you are). A number of different approaches have been developed; one such approach is the OAuth specification, which is designed as a fool-proof way of validating requests.

Because of the growing popularity of the OAuth protocol, we’ve added support for it to the Dojo Toolkit in the form of dojox.io.OAuth—which can be used to sign any request made with the Dojo Toolkit’s various Ajax methods, including XHR, IFrame and Script transports.

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As an Ajax developer, I’m always looking for easy ways of helping my development process—things to make development faster, easier ways of checking things, etc. Today I’ll share two quick and easy tricks I use all the time when developing web applications using the Dojo Toolkit.

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Recently, there’s been a spat of editorials regarding custom fonts for the web—with two competing proposals (Microsoft’s EOT and embedding a TrueType font directly with the @font-face directive), as well as the well known Fahrner Image Replacement technique, and the related sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) technique.

I’m pleased to announce yet another technique: rendering SVG font definitions using dojox.gfx, coming in the Dojo Toolkit 1.2 release!

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In the last post on string performance, we did an analysis of string performance that spanned all of the major browsers, with the goal of optimizing the performance of the dojox.string.Builder. While we were able to create significant improvements in performance—particularly with Firefox—the performance under Internet Explorer was still pretty poor compared to native methods.

The goal for this article was to bring Builder’s performance down to comparable native operations—and we were able to do with through a combination of a slight change in code with using different ways of calling the append method.

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Recently I was writing a “tips and tricks” blog post that was going to focus on the idea that it is better to use an object as a “string buffer”; the idea was that by passing this object around to various functions and pushing string fragments into it, you can get better performance from a JavaScript engine. My friend and colleague Alex Russell challenged me to show him hard data supporting this hypothesis—and the results were quite eye-opening!

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With the release of the iPhone 1.1.3 firmware update, Apple has given us the ability to create custom “webclip” icons (think “favicon” for your iPhone and iPod Touch) by adding a special file called “apple-touch-icon.png” to the root of your website (same place as the favicon). As an example, to the left is the new icon for SitePen.

If you have an iPhone, give it a whirl: hit the SitePen home page and add it to your home!

(Webclip icon linkage from Daring Fireball, Dan Dickinson, and Hicks Design.)

One of the more exciting projects coming out of the Dojo Toolkit is DojoX Graphics–a cross-browser API for creating vector graphics. Over the next few months, I’ll be writing a series of tutorials showing you how you can use DojoX Graphics to accomplish a number of tasks–starting with showing you how to soften a polyline like this:

…to this……using cubic bezier curve segments.

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In the past two or so months that I’ve been an employee of SitePen, my main task has been to design and write the materials for the majority of our new training course offering’s including slides, activity handouts, working code equivalents, slide design (which in the end Torrey did, a brilliant job too), and other branding aspects. On top of that, I’ve had to design these materials in such a way as to allow any of the SitePen instructors to create a specific course in a minimum amount of time with the ability to cherry-pick among various topics all to give our clientele the best learning experience possible.

The result has been to take a modularized approach to training materials. Like with the Dojo Toolkit (the main focus of our training offerings), I created a set of resources by topic that any of our instructors can then use to assemble a full presentation. You simply open the Keynote presentation on that particular topic, and drag all of the slides to the show that you’re working on. Very simple and neat!
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