We’re pleased to announce the two latest projects from SitePen Labs: Paver and Persevere!

(more…)

In March, we introduced the SitePen Support service to provide high-quality support for Dojo, DWR and Cometd from the people who know those projects inside and out.

We’re always watching to see how we can make our services better and after listening to our early support clients we’re making changes to ensure that clients are successful with the products we support.

(more…)

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!

(more…)

This is the final part of our three part series on porting Dojo methods to Flash.

In part one of our series, we implemented Dojo’s hitch method, and then used hitch in part two, where we made our connect method. In part three, we will be using both of these methods as we connect a JavaScript object to a Flash object.

(more…)

In the course of the last two months I have been talking to people about dojox.charting changes. I collected a lot of wishes, valuable feedback, and even some great patches introducing new exciting features. But in order to accommodate suggestions and planned features, we need to reorganize the codebase. The reorganization was looming and its time has come. This week I was going over Dojo charting trac tickets and the roadmap.

(more…)

Dojo supports JSON-RPC, which is an easy to use JSON-based remote method call format. JSON-RPC can be utilized for an interoperable approach to distributed computing and communicating with servers. We will look at an example of interacting with Java on the server and invoking a Java method from JavaScript using Dojo’s RPC services. We will be begin by demonstrating a simple JSON-RPC handler written in Java. First we will create a servlet and write a POST handler that will read the content from the request:

public class JsonRPC extends HttpServlet {
    protected void doPost(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) 
		throws ServletException, IOException {
         String content = streamToString(req.getInputStream());

(more…)

Adobe recently announced their new Open Screen project, which opens the licensing of the Flash Player and much more.

We’re celebrating this event with a three part series on Dojo and ActionScript and previewing some of the work by the Dojo team.

(more…)

There’s been some breaking news from Adobe, announcing their Open Screen project. As of today, they are opening the licensing of the Flash Player, FLV/F4V video, publishing the AMF protocol and device APIs for the player, and more.

This is great news for businesses, developers, and the Open Web in general. No longer does open source ActionScript code need to do workarounds and leave things out in an effort to make it “as open as reasonably possible”.

In celebration of this announcement, we’re beginning our three part series on ActionScript code, and preview some of the Dojo team’s efforts in this area.

(more…)

I think we’ve all seen Apache directory listings? They are a list of links + icons that detail the contents of the directory. You can go wild with a custom handler to format directory listing requests however you want. But for most cases they work just fine out of the box. They are kind of tedious to browse through though: scroll, scroll, click, or - worse - tab, tab, tab (tab, tab,) enter. A little Dojo magic might go a long way here.

This tutorial shows you how to upgrade those plain vanilla pages to make getting around a little faster and along the way introduce you to some of the most useful bits of Dojo, and practical techniques for working with them. We’ll touch on: dojo.query, dojo.data, the dojo parser and dijit (specifically the FilteringSelect widget.)

(more…)

One of the biggest problems Dojo has when trying to attract new users is the fact that our community rarely promotes one method of writing code as THE WAY. Following suit, I’m not going to say that one method of doing things is better than the next. Ultimately, arguing that there is one catch-all solution to the problems coders face when developing for the web is one way to drive away users as soon as they realize that they want something more.

With this in mind, I’ll outline three strategies available with The Dojo Toolkit. Each offers different levels of control and different benefits. Hopefully, some of the negativity aimed toward some of these strategies is only because of a lack of understanding about their purpose. After some of that has been dispelled, I hope to kill any remaining bad feelings by showing that some of the things you might feel that the toolkit imposes on you can be fixed — with either a simple alias or a simple function.

(more…)