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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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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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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[Note: This blog post is out of date.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.]

We have posted up the default user-interface widget for Dojo Offline; this is all coded up now in JavaScript and is complete. This means all the default user-interface code, which lives in dojo.dot.ui, is done. The UI is ‘driven’ by the rest of the Dojo Offline framework, which includes dojo.dot and dojo.sync. Note that there is no real code inside of dojo.dot and dojo.sync; these are just stubs for now and return suitable ‘fake’ data to drive the UI. The next step is to actually code the inside of dojo.dot and dojo.sync, which actually persist data and do syncing.

I have updated Moxie, a demo offline web based word processor, to use the new Dojo Offline UI. Check it out. I have confirmed that the UI widget works in Safari, Internet Explorer, and Firefox, cross-platform. Play around with the widget and tell me if you find any glitches. Please note that the Dojo Offline Widget’s UI doesn’t currently actually do any persisting or synchronizing; it is ‘dumb’ and is just driven by the rest of Dojo Offline (dojo.dot and dojo.sync, which isn’t currently implemented.

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Just to let folks know, we are posting weekly status updates for the Dojo Offline Toolkit over on the SitePen Labs blog every Monday. Make sure to check it out each week to see how our progress is going! View the blog here, or grab it’s RSS feed here for your RSS reader to subscribe to updates.

[Note: This blog post is out of date.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

Introduction

The best way to start development on a programming framework is to ground it in the kinds of user interfaces it will be used in. This ensures that you don’t create astronaut architectures that have no real world use.

The first step in creating the Dojo Offline Toolkit is to therefore figure out what offline web applications might look like. This will help us determine what to include in the Dojo Offline API and what to leave out, and will also be bundled as a simple HTML/CSS template that developers can easily drop into their applications.

SitePen kicked this off by creating offline-enabled mockups of three popular and useful web applications: Gmail, Blogger, and a corporate portal named Adenine. For all three the goal is to find a consistent, simple user-interface for offline web applications.

Gmail	Blogger

Corporate Portal

Gmail

We start with a mockup of an offline-enabled Gmail (click on any of the images to view them full-size):

The first thing to notice is the addition of a new widget on the left-hand side of the page, the Offline Info widget. This widget encapsulates all of our offline functionality for Gmail.

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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.]

Introduction

I’m proud to announce the kick off of the Dojo Offline Toolkit, which SitePen has graciously agreed to sponsor and fund. SitePen is a leader in pushing the web browser in new directions, and I’m extremely excited to be working on this project with the SitePen crew.

Last month, in December, I came up for air after finishing HyperScope 1.1 and touched base with Dylan Schiemann, CEO of SitePen, about consulting with them. On the phone I mentioned off hand to Dylan that I had been prototyping and playing with some ideas around bringing true offline access to web applications in a simple, generic way. Dylan mentioned that SitePen would be very interested in such a framework, since it would help them bring in new clients, and offered to fund full-time development of it for the next three months. Wow; what a mensh.

Starting today, I will be working full-time the next three months on bringing the Dojo Offline Toolkit from the drawing board to reality, thanks to SitePen. The Dojo Offline Toolkit will be an open source library that brings true, offline access to web applications, in a simple, generic way that developers can easily bring into their web applications. Users will be able to access their web applications and work with their data even if no network connection is available, just like desktop applications.

What is the Dojo Offline Toolkit?

The Dojo Offline Toolkit will be a small, cross-platform, generic download that enables web applications to work offline.

Let’s look at the Dojo Offline Toolkit from a user’s perspective. Imagine Alex is using a web-based real estate application for realtors built with the Dojo Offline Toolkit. In the upper-right corner of this web application is a button that says “Work Offline.” The first time Alex clicks on this button, a small window appears informing him that this web application can be accessed and used even if he is offline. If Dojo Offline has never been installed, Alex is prompted to optionally install a small 100K through 300K download that is automatically selected for his appropriate OS, including Windows, Linux/x86, and Mac OS X/Universal Binary.

Once Dojo Offline is installed with the included installer, the web-based real estate application prompts Alex to drag a hyperlink to his desktop and bookmark the web application’s URL. As Alex works online, anything that should be available offline is simply stored locally. If Alex is offline, he can reach his application by simply double-clicking the link on his desktop, opening its bookmark, or by simply typing in its normal web address. The application’s user-interface will magically appear in the browser, even if the user is offline, and all offline data will be retrieved from and stored into local storage. Dojo Offline detects when the network has reappeared, allowing the web application to send any data stored in local storage to the web server.

Local storage is done using Dojo Storage, which allows web applications to store hundreds of K or megabytes of information inside the browser, with the user’s permission. Dojo Storage is complete and works across 95% of the existing installed base of the web, including Firefox, Safari, and Mozilla on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. The Dojo Offline Toolkit will come bundled with Dojo Storage.

Once Dojo Offline has been installed, it will work for any web application that codes to it — it is completely generic and has no application specific information in its download. Applications have a consistent, simple API they can code to, the Dojo Offline and Dojo Storage APIs, to enable offline ability. Even better, since the user always interacts with the web application through its domain name, rather than through a file:// URL or http://localhost domain name, the web application runs under the same security policies as standard web sites, which means a user’s machine will not be compromised by an untrusted web application. The Dojo Offline Toolkit will work in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, and will run on Windows, Linux/x86, and Mac OS X/Universal Binary.

The Dojo Offline Toolkit will be fully open source, available under the same licenses as Dojo: the BSD and the AFL.

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