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.
Tags: css, datebox, dijit, form, input, spinner, style, text, timebox
Posted in Dojo, Firebug, JavaScript, UI Design, ajax, browsers, debugging | 8 Comments
With the proliferation of real web browsers on mobile devices (iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Nokia), an increasing number of browsers (Chrome) or browser-like platforms (AIR, Titanium, Jaxer), portal standards for widgets and gadgets (Caja, AdSafe, work by the OpenAjax Alliance, and much more), are the days numbered for a JavaScript toolkit that uses the same code base across all platforms without a compile step numbered?
Tags: browser detection, optimization, Performance
Posted in Dojo, JavaScript, air, ajax, browsers, mobile, thoughts | 6 Comments
The design and styling elements that make up the Web 2.0 mantra have been defined by—among other things—rounded corners, transparency, and drop shadows. These three concepts have been key in many CSS-driven web applications or sites. (For examples of some great CSS-driven work, check out cssvault and cssBeauty.) Following the CSS2 recommendation, for years we’ve been using a combination of code and images to make these types of things possible.
My colleague, Torrey Rice, has touched upon unofficial CSS advancements in Safari 3.1 in his discussion about CSS animations, so I’ll focus on advancements that are part of ongoing CSS3 drafts. While CSS 3 as a whole is much maligned, we can use some of the properties that have already been implemented in today’s browsers with just a few simple lines of CSS. Dijit Themes for the Dojo Tooolkit already take advantage of these enhancements where it makes sense. Of course, you can also customize or write your own theme taking advantage of CSS3 wherever possible.
Tags: CSS3
Posted in Dojo, UI Design, browsers | 2 Comments
The Dojo Toolkit 1.2 has landed and I’ll be talking about a new feature — dojo.attr — and its closely related cousin, dojo.style. In a given block of HTML, not all attributes are created equally. Take the following example:
The Dojo Toolkit now has support for multi-file uploads, thanks to the new Deft project. The dojox.form.FileUploader class embeds a hidden SWF file in the page which, when triggered, will open a system dialog that supports multiple file selection, and also file masks, which allows the user to filter their selection by file type.
Tags: Deft, Dojo, dojox, Uploader
Posted in Dojo, JavaScript, Open Source, browsers | 42 Comments
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.
Tags: ie6, ie7, internet explorer, string
Posted in Dojo, JavaScript, Performance, browsers | 11 Comments
Recently improvements have landed in Dojo Toolkit version of Firebug Lite. These improvements have taken it beyond the desperate need for logging in Internet Explorer to a very viable alternative. In fact, the reasoning behind some of the improvements I have implemented is to develop on Safari, which is so fast you sometimes forget you’re coding an application for a browser.
Posted in Dojo, Firebug, ajax, browsers, debugging | 3 Comments