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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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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I’m excited to announce a new BSD-licensed project created by SitePen and co-sponsored by Adobe: Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR.

This new effort creates a new namespace, dair, making it even easier to create rich desktop apps, such as the Dojo Toolbox, using the Dojo Toolkit and Adobe AIR.

The extensions offer convenience methods for your application, wrapping many common AIR Patterns in Dojo-like constructors and providing an entire framework from which to grow. Built-in persistent storage, granular window control from creation to destruction, Window FX, Audio/Video helpers, and extra console debugging facilities are just the beginning.

This work was greatly inspired by our creation of the Dojo Toolbox. It simplifies Ajax application development on the AIR platform for not only Dojo users, but also anyone creating an Ajax application inside AIR. Thanks again to Adobe for helping make this possible.

I’ll be speaking in more detail about this on the afternoon of Monday, November 17th at Adobe MAX in San Francisco.

Visit the Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR project page for full details, including a screencast, downloads, examples, documentation, and of course the source code and information on getting involved. Of course, if you need help creating a great AIR-based desktop app, contact us for more information on how we can assist you.

The Dojo Toolkit has been around for over four years, and has undergone significant changes, both big and small, in becoming a great JavaScript toolkit. This article debunks myth and outdated assumptions (both fair and false) applied to Dojo over its four plus years of development.

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Building the Dojo Toolbox allowed us to dive into Adobe® AIR™, and to create a blended toolchain of JavaScript, PHP, Python and Rhino (JavaScript on the Java Virtual Machine) for developing an amazing desktop application using open web technologies. Read about how we built the Toolbox and what we really think of AIR.

The Initial Whirlwind

We started in late May with zero experience developing an Adobe AIR application and a goal of getting a great application developed in about one month. We had to figure out what exactly we wanted the Toolbox to do and what it could do. We also had to begin figuring out how to make it all happen. Just about all software projects start out that way, right?

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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.

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A new top-level package was recently added to the Dojo Toolkit called Deft — an acronym for Dojo Experimental Flex Technology. The Deft package was created and is maintained by SitePen’s Tom Trenka, taking advantage of Adobe’s new MPL licensing, and the corresponding APIs of the Flash Player. Most articles focus on Adobe’s Flex Builder, which isn’t open source or free. The majority of articles about Flex and the Flex Builder also put an emphasis on components developed using a combination of ActionScript and XML-based description files, known as MXML.

Instead of taking this approach, Deft focuses on ActionScript components created in support of the various projects within the Dojo Toolkit (mostly for DojoX). Deft source files are well organized based in part on the organization of other Dojo Toolkit projects, as well as the package structure required by the Flex compiler. Most Flex applications are based on the Flex AS3 Application class, which forces you to write at least one “controlling” MXML file in order compile your code. Instead of this, Deft components inherit primarily from the Sprite class — which allows you to write pure ActionScript code.

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A new data querying tool for has been added to Dojo 1.2. JSONQuery is a new module intended to succeed and improve upon the JSONPath module introduced in Dojo 1.1. JSONQuery provides a comprehensive set of data querying tools including filtering, recursive search, sorting, mapping, range selection, and flexible expressions with wildcard string comparisons and various operators.

JSONQuery provides safe evaluation with language agnostic expressions that prevents arbitrary code execution. It also uses intuitive result-based evaluation that allows successive query operations. Furthermore, the new JSONQuery module provides significant performance improvements, with 20-100x faster execution with the common filter operation on large arrays than the JSONPath module. JSONQuery generally supersets the functionality of JSONPath and provides syntax that matches and behaves like JavaScript where the syntax intersects for maximum ease of use.

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With the release of Dojo 1.2 right around the corner, there’s an updated grid widget available. It offers new features and performance improvements over the existing grid including better Dojo data integration, simplified layout structures, and the ability to enable editing much more easily.

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In the middle of May, we were given a mission: create a speedy, offline API documentation viewer and a graphical Dojo build tool. Here we are at the beginning of July, and the result is the Dojo Toolbox 1.0. This article is a first look at this new application.

Adobe® AIR™ has received a good deal of press attention over the past few months, and with good reason. It provides a way for web application developers to use the skills they already have to create cross-platform desktop applications. Starting with Dojo 1.1, Dojo has included support for AIR out-of-the-box. This made AIR an ideal target environment for the Dojo Toolbox.

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