In the course of the last two months I have been talking to people about dojox.charting changes. I collected a lot of wishes, valuable feedback, and even some great patches introducing new exciting features. But in order to accommodate suggestions and planned features, we need to reorganize the codebase. The reorganization was looming and its time has come. This week I was going over Dojo charting trac tickets and the roadmap.

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Recently Apple delivered Safari 3.1 with some very exciting features. While we still can’t use things like multiple background images and drop shadows across all browsers, we are getting to play with the future and I, for one, am loving it. One of the most interesting things in Safari 3.1 is the (hopefully soon to be proposed and standardized as part of the CSS3 spec) CSS Animations. CSS animations allow you to animate just about any property on an element as well as do fun things like rotate and skew. As a demo of this I created a quick and dirty CSS3 fisheye/dock demo. As an added bonus, the demo uses SVG in the img tag.

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As we kick off 2008, I’m pleased and extremely excited to announce that we’ve added some awesome, new talent to the SitePen team.

Eugene Lazutkin is highly respected in Dojo circles for his work on Drag-n-drop, GFX (2D and 3D), Charting, and many other crucial 0.9 and 1.0 features. For the past two years, Eugene has also been a key Dojo mentor for the Google Summer of Code. His deep background in 2D and 3D graphics is an asset to any team and we’re looking forward to working with Eugene to help push the state of open web data visualization even further.

Peter Higgins is a prolific contributor to Dojo, improving Dijit and developing tons of great new UI controls. When not building great UIs, Peter has been doggedly helping us build a stronger Dojo community. In addition to joining SitePen, Peter is also assuming the role of official Dojo Evangelist for the Dojo Toolkit.

Kris Zyp is well known for his open source work on JavaScript and JSON. Kris has created numerous projects and products including Authenteo, a web content management system, Persevere, a set of tools for persistence and distributed computing, and JSPON, an extension to JSON for advanced techniques such as multiple referencing, circular referencing, object identification, modification, and structural definition.

Strengthening the SitePen team is one of our primary goals for 2008, allowing us to continue to push the limits of the Open Web! Happy New Year!

In response to recent articles by Andy Clarke and David Baron, Alex recently said that the W3C cannot save us. The most significant point being made is that you cannot standardize the future, and you should not punish those who attempt to push the envelope through experimentation and invention.

In the late 90s, there was little in the way of web standards, but an amazing amount of progress and innovation. WASP and others heavily pushed browser vendors to properly implement HTML, CSS, and DOM standards. For the most part, they were successful with this effort, and with the effort of encouraging developers to use those standards.

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Chris Mitchell of IBM had a few days of free time prior to the Dojo 1.0 release, and so he added Canvas support for dojox.gfx. While Canvas does not offer all of the DOM goodness of SVG, it does have one key features: it works today on the iPhone. While we expect the iPhone’s version of Safari to be updated to support SVG for vector graphics and charting very soon, it allows us to draw and chart natively on the iPhone now:

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Last night, we helped put the finishing touches on Dojo 1.0. 3 1/2 years in the making, we’re extremely pleased to reach this great milestone. The Dojo community has done an amazing job this year, completely rewriting everything with a focus on performance, speed, ease of development, and amazing user experience.

Recent advancements in Dojo include:

• Accessibility including keyboard navigation, low vision support, and ARIA markup for assistive technologies
• High performance grid widget supporting 100,000+ rows of data
• Browser-native 2-D and 3-D charting
• A full library of easy-to-use, attractive UI controls
• Universal data access for simple and fast data-driven widget development
• Internationalization with localizations provided for 13 major languages
• CSS-driven themes to make customization and extension simple
• Dojo Offline, based on Google Gears, which makes offline applications easy to build
• Support for the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits
• Native 2-D and 3-D vector graphics drawing
• Access to many more widgets and extensions through the Dojo package system

Read more at the Dojo 1.0 press release.

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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Safari on the iPhone does not currently have support for SVG. Safari 3 beta on Mac and Windows is currently the best browser on the planet for SVG performance, so this is a somewhat disappointing omission. We are hopeful that by the end of the year, the iPhone will receive the Safari 3 upgrade, and along with that native support for SVG. For now, we’ll have to wait on dynamic charting and drawing tools due to no SVG and the lack of mousemove event handlers.

Until the release of GMail, much of the innovation in the world of Ajax (at that time known as DHTML and JavaScript) was occurring behind the scenes in corporate intranet applications. At one point, Alex Russell and I concluded that the “DHTML Dark Matter” was at least 10 times the size of the public-facing applications such as Oddpost that were available more than three years ago.

While there is now widespread adoption of Ajax across virtually every class of application on the internet, there are still a number of interesting inventions and advancements occurring inside the firewall, part of the ever-growing “Ajax Dark Matter.”

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At SXSW and AjaxWorld, I had the opportunity to talk about dojo.gfx and native web vector graphics in general. The amazing thing about these talks was the large number of attendees familiar with and interested in SVG, Canvas, and other native vector graphics formats.

It’s still very early, but the interest in collaborative web applications that involve richer, interactive drawing capabilities is growing rapidly. I’m pleased to announce that I am making my slides available online for both of these talks. What is interesting about these slides, even more than the content within them, is that both were created using dojo.gfx. They are great examples of mixing HTML and SVG/VML techniques to create a nice user interface. While there is nothing explicitly preventing them from working cross-browser, I have only tested them on Firefox 2 given time constraints.