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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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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Apple’s iPhone web application development tips are yet the latest example of blurring the lines between the power of the web and the desktop. The example that drives this point home the most is Google Maps:

Google maps links open a built-in Google client rather than making a connection through the public website.

On the desktop, we’re seeing Dojo Offline and Google Gears, as well as more proprietary offerings such as Adobe’s AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight. One interesting thing coming from Apple that has not received much mention is WebKit and Cocoa bindings, including JavaScript bindings. Soon we’ll be able to use open web standards to create native Mac apps!

The proliferation of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS is rapidly spreading to every area of software development, because open web standards are powerful and relatively easy to comprehend.

Shortly after we began working on Dojo Offline, our friends at Google invited us over to the Googleplex to tell us about their efforts in building an open source project similar to Dojo Offline called Google Gears. Since the release of Dojo Offline, we’ve been working with Google to make Dojo Offline and Google Gears work well together. The Dojo Offline API now works with Google Gears, providing a flexible and easy extension to Google’s API and offline platform. We’re very excited about this collaboration, and will be demonstrating this work at the Google Developer Day in San Jose on May 31. If you are attending, we hope to see you there and show some great examples of what is possible with Dojo Offline + Google Gears!

Dojo Offline + Google Gears Podcast

At the beginning of 2007, we announced a collaboration with Brad Neuberg to develop the Dojo Offline Toolkit, and today we are pleased to announce the beta release!

Several people have asked how and why we decided to do this, and how this relationship came about. From the SitePen perspective, our clients have an obvious need for offline web applications. We’ve known Brad for a while through Dojo and his contributions to dojo.storage and dojo.flash, and highly respect his high quality work and his approach to tackling challenging problems. After Brad finished the HyperScope project, we started talking in greater detail with him in November about how to improve dojo.storage for offline usage. We quickly came to the conclusion that we had similar goals and interests, as well as a similar commitment to open source software, and agreed to collaborate on the development of Dojo Offline.

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