As 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.

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SitePen 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.

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At 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?

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The 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.

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SitePen’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.

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Last 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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SitePen and uxebu are pleased to announce their first joint Dojo workshop in Munich, Germany. Come join some of the co-creators of Dojo on the 7th and 8th of May, 2009 to learn how to build great web sites and applications with Dojo. This new workshop will be an engaging experience for anyone wanting to learn more about Dojo!

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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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I’m excited to announce a new open source project created by SitePen and co-sponsored by Adobe: Queued. With Queued, you can manage your Netflix queue anytime, anywhere!

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Dojo here. Since Adobe AIR provides a platform that integrates desktop features into the browser development model, it’s easy to see where our favorite JavaScript toolkit fits: it’s every bit the springboard in the AIR world as it is in the browser world. We designed Queued to show what the Dojo + AIR combo can do.

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In a previous post I provided the steps to get you up and running with Adobe AIR. I’ll continue with the debugging features available in AIR and the Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR (dAIR). The Adobe AIR Introspector is a Firebug-like console that logs messages and has code inspectors. Its logging capability is good, but it’s made even better with code in the dair namespace.

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