Dojo 1.4 sports a fantastic tree widget, complete with ARIA compliance, keyboard accessibility, and internationalization (including right-to-left layout for appropriate countries and languages). For large tree data sets, we want to be able to only load the necessary data for the visible nodes of the tree. As a user expands a node, we then want to load the children of that node. Ideally, we only want to make one HTTP request per expansion for optimal performance. Historically, effective lazy loading has been a challenge, but some recent additions will make it much easier to utilize efficient lazy loading mechanisms in the tree.
Posts in the ‘ajax’ Category
Efficient Lazy Loading of a Tree
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010Bespin Goes Social
Monday, August 24th, 2009The Dojo-based Bespin project has added collaboration and social features so developers can more easily share code in real-time! Finally, a truly productive use of social networking for developers!
By combining the benefits of SubEthaEdit and many of the social features you find on networking sites, the project is headed in a very useful direction that should significantly improve the way software is developed.
Web 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.
Queued: Theming
Friday, April 3rd, 2009As part of our series on how we built Queued, today we’re going to talk about theming the Queued application, and touch on a few examples of what made putting the skin on Queued so much fun.
The foundation for the beautiful theme for Queued was laid down by colleagues Damon Dimmick and Torrey Rice, and their amazing wireframe and mockup work (respectively) provided the building blocks for laying down Queued’s skin.
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.
Queued: Demystifying Deferreds
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009At SitePen, we work very hard to to provide our customers and fellow developers with useful web app development services. We’re currently deconstructing the development of Queued, our Netflix Queue management application built with Dojo and Adobe AIR. Having presented on dojo.deferred and related topics at the Ajax Experience, and having heard that the Queued team ran into a few problems with them, I thought it would be interesting to review problems that are sometimes encountered when using Deferreds. What is the source of these problems, are these problems related to bugs or because there are misunderstandings, and how should we address this going forward?
Queued: Architectural Decisions
Monday, March 30th, 2009Dojo is a very flexible toolkit; it doesn’t dictate how you organize your code or create your widgets. It simply provides tools, and it’s up to you to decide how you want to fit them together. Developing with AIR puts you squarely in the browser-based application model, but aside from that it mostly stays out of your way as well. As part of our series on the Queued development process, I’m going to take a look at the decisions we made and the philosophies we adopted for the project. It should provide some insight into our process.
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.
Queued Overviewed
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009Last 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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