The new Dojo Search is now live. I worked on creating this with the goal of showing how much information there is out there about the Dojo Toolkit and supplying a way to aggregate that information in a central location. Now you can search all of Dojo’s Resources instead of dojotoolkit.org alone. Most of the time if you have a question, it’s already been asked and answered!

The Dojo community is large and there is a lot of great information spread out across the vastness of the web. The Dojo Toolkit has been around for a while and has undergone numerous additions and improvements since its inception. Unfortunately, some of the documentation and valuable data needed by users and enthusiasts is decentralized. Dojo Search is designed to help alleviate this problem.

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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.

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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.

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SitePen and Dojo are proud to announce a new beta release of Dojo Offline. This release has a huge amount of exciting new functionality, including a full port to Google Gears, a port from Dojo 0.4 to 0.9, and more.

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We’ve pushed out the beta of Dojo Offline! See the official Dojo weblog for details.

[Note: This blog post is out of date. For up to date information on Dojo Offline please see the official web page.]

Hi folks; lots of news on the Dojo Offline front.First, we have put up a screencast that shows a demo of Dojo Offline named Moxie. Moxie is an example application bundled with Dojo Offline that shows how to use the Dojo Offline framework. It is a web-based word processor that features local storage and offline access. Moxie is now finished for Dojo Offline.

Watch the Dojo Offline Screencast

Next, we’ve finished the JavaScript layer of Dojo Offline. Dojo Offline consists of two major pieces: a JavaScript API that is included with a web application, and which helps with syncing, on/offline status notification, caching of data and resources, etc.; and a local small web proxy download that is cross-platform and cross-browser and which is web application independent. The JavaScript API is now finished, and can actually be used even though we have not finished the local web proxy yet. This is done by having the JavaScript layer be able to use the browser’s native cache if no offline cache is available. This means you can start playing with Dojo Offline right now, with the download link included in this blog post below. Note that using the browser cache instead of the web proxy is only suitable for prototyping and should not be deployed on production applications; it will work with varying degrees of success on Internet Explorer and Firefox, but not consistently on Safari. Higher levels of reliability will only come when we deliver the local web proxy component.

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[Note: This blog post is out of date. For up to date information on Dojo Offline please see the official web page.]

The last few weeks we’ve been putting together our API for the Dojo Offline Toolkit (DOT). How will a programmer use this toolkit in their work? How will it be integrated into their applications?

Last week we reported on addressing usability for offline access, with offline mockups of popular web apps. Usability is just as important for programmers as it is for end-users, it just takes a different form: the API, or Application Programmer Interface. Getting the API right is just as important as the UI; programmers need the love too.

Look Mah, No Proxy!

Before we dive down into the API, I want to share a nice surprise: the Dojo Offline Toolkit API has been designed to not necessarily need a web proxy. For example, if your browser has native support for offline access, then we don’t need to download the small web proxy — the browser will simply cache these offline resources. The plan for Firefox 3 is to natively support such an API — in this scenario, Dojo Offline could simply use the browser’s offline cache rather than requiring you to download the web proxy.

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