Dojo 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.

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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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Sometimes building an application from scratch is easier than building on an already existing interaction model. For Queued, our goal was to take the Netflix user experience and port it to a lightweight desktop application, while adding some modest enhancements.

Creating an alternate interface for an already well-known web site carries some unique responsibilities. First, unless there is something seriously wrong with the original site, straying too far from the established model can be counterproductive. Second, innovating on existing features becomes more important than replacing them. And third, adding new interface functionality without obstructing existing interactions remains a crucial consideration.

For the Queued project, SitePen faced the additional challenge of showing off features of Adobe AIR that might not necessarily lead to the most fluid interaction, but which were powerful enough to merit inclusion as a demonstration of AIR’s powerful capabilities. We’ll discuss a few of our interaction changes here, though these aren’t the only modifications that we decided to implement.

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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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The AIR platform defines distinct sandboxes for trusted and untrusted code, and provides a way to talk securely between each sandbox via sandbox “bridges”. This is a lynch-pin in the web-meets-desktop strategy that AIR embodies, but it can also present some of the trickier development challenges, with plenty of head-banging opportunity. I’ll share a few tips to help you avoid those head/keyboard collisions.

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There was a lot of activity in the Dojo Toolkit community this week, including an update for Dojo Storage plus articles on productivity and writing DRYer code.

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Mobile application development has many challenges. The announcement of Google Gears on Mobile Devices will help solve the problems of network connectivity, network latency, and limited bandwidth. On the desktop, a lot of the focus on Gears was its ability to allow applications to function when your computer was not connected to the network. In addition to building mobile web apps here at SitePen, we released Dojo Offline, which integrates the Dojo Toolkit with Gears to make building disconnected web applications even easier. As we all know, mobile devices lose connectivity with the network on a regular basis. Gears’ ability to keep the data that users need stored on the phone will be key to keeping mobile applications running even when networks fail to keep phones connected.

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While the media has beat us to the punch with countless “on AIR” puns (and the list of companies using the word air grows), we completed work to make the Dojo Toolkit compatible with Adobe AIR in time for its recent launch.

What is AIR?

It’s a platform for web app deployment that’s somewhat similar to a browser: web applications are deployed to the desktop using AIR, giving web applications some of the capabilities of desktop apps while retaining the ability to use web app development tools like the Dojo Toolkit.

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Palo Alto, CA - February 25, 2008 - SitePen Inc. today announced updates to the Dojo Toolkit that allow Ajax developers to easily deploy web applications created with the Dojo Toolkit on Adobe® AIR™. Adobe collaborated with SitePen to revise the Dojo Toolkit and enable compatibility with Adobe® AIR™.

“The Dojo Toolkit is a popular and important toolkit for web application developers, and now Dojo Toolkit developers can seamlessly deploy their applications on Adobe AIR,” said Rob Christensen, senior product manager, Adobe AIR at Adobe. “We engaged with SitePen and their expert team of Dojo Toolkit Contributors to make this possible for developers.”

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Google released the first preview of Android today. It is chock full of features and a great emulator, but there was one interesting omission.

Beyond what has been covered elsewhere, there are many attention grabbing features for mobile app developers:

• XMPP in the application stack, giving applications access to low-latency event driven messaging
• Location data (via GPS or cell-tower triangulation) accessible by applications
• SQLite for local data storage
• Applications can provide services to other applications… no need for 10 different photo taking apps

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