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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With the recent launch of Dojo 0.9 and the planned launch of 1.0 in late October, the SitePen Dojo training courses have been revamped and now focus exclusively on the new code base.

SitePen’s partnership with UK-based Skills Matter is allowing us to offer our 3-day Dojo training workshop overseas, several times, in the upcoming months.

• London, Oct. 15-17, 2007
• London, Nov 14-16, 2007
• London, July 9-11, 2007
• Denmark, July 15-17, 2008

On another note, and speaking of Skills Matter, the Grails eXchange is taking place October 17-19 in London, and I will be giving a brief talk on Dojo there as well. Skills Matter puts on a number of great training sessions and evening seminars, and we have high expectations for their first major conference. The itinerary includes a number of excellent sessions on Ajax and Comet techniques to be presented by Joe Walker, Jonas Jacobi, Scott Davis, Dave Crane, and Sven Haiges. As an event sponsor, SitePen is pleased to offer a £100 discount to all of our friends and clients. Please contact us for the promotion code and then visit Grails eXchange to register!

One of the more exciting projects coming out of the Dojo Toolkit is DojoX Graphics–a cross-browser API for creating vector graphics. Over the next few months, I’ll be writing a series of tutorials showing you how you can use DojoX Graphics to accomplish a number of tasks–starting with showing you how to soften a polyline like this:

…to this……using cubic bezier curve segments.

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We’re speaking at and/or attending a number of upcoming events and conferences. We hope to see you there!

• May 20-23: Alex will be attending the IEEE Privacy and Security Symposium in Oakland, CA. Prior to our Dojo days, Alex spent most of his time thinking about security.
• May 23-25: I’ll be conducting a 3-day Dojo Training Course in London. The course will focus on Dojo 0.4, but will explain many of the changes happening in 0.9 as we work through the relevant topics.
• May 24: While in London for the training course, I’ll lead an evening discussion about Dojo 0.9.
• May 31: A few of us from the SitePen team will be attending the Google Developer Day in Mountain View to hang out and learn more about the latest Google Developer APIs.

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In the past two or so months that I’ve been an employee of SitePen, my main task has been to design and write the materials for the majority of our new training course offering’s including slides, activity handouts, working code equivalents, slide design (which in the end Torrey did, a brilliant job too), and other branding aspects. On top of that, I’ve had to design these materials in such a way as to allow any of the SitePen instructors to create a specific course in a minimum amount of time with the ability to cherry-pick among various topics all to give our clientele the best learning experience possible.

The result has been to take a modularized approach to training materials. Like with the Dojo Toolkit (the main focus of our training offerings), I created a set of resources by topic that any of our instructors can then use to assemble a full presentation. You simply open the Keynote presentation on that particular topic, and drag all of the slides to the show that you’re working on. Very simple and neat!
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