SitePen is excited to announce Stocker, which demonstrates some of the more advanced capabilities of Dojo, including the newly released DataChart, the DataGrid, Data Store, Comet, Persevere, and BorderContainer. SitePen is also offering a one-day workshop where you will learn how to create Stocker yourself, but I’m here to give you a sneak peak of what Stocker is and how it works.

Stocker uses these technologies to emulate a stock monitoring application. We’re using made up data, but that’s actually more interesting. The Persevere server generates new stock items at certain intervals, and then pushes them to the browser with Comet. Then the Data Store updates its items and triggers an onSet notification. The DataGrid and DataChart are both connected to the same store, and are listening to that event. They then update their displays and show the stock items and their latest data.

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The latest addition in the Dojo 1.3 release is the new dojox.charting class, DataChart. Its primary purpose is to make connecting a chart to a Data Store a simple process. There are also other benefits with DataChart: less parameters are needed to create a basic chart, and more defaults and convenience methods get you up and running quickly with Dojox Charting.

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Recently, there’s been a spat of editorials regarding custom fonts for the web—with two competing proposals (Microsoft’s EOT and embedding a TrueType font directly with the @font-face directive), as well as the well known Fahrner Image Replacement technique, and the related sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) technique.

I’m pleased to announce yet another technique: rendering SVG font definitions using dojox.gfx, coming in the Dojo Toolkit 1.2 release!

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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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Part 1 of this guide on Dojo charting covered a basic charting example and the options available in defining our chart type. Today we will examine the options for defining our axes and data sets.

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According to the previous article (Dojo Charting: Event Support Has Landed!) the next items on our plan for improving Dojo Charting are the widgetization of charting, events, and integration with the Tooltip widget. In addition to all of these features now being available in trunk, the Legend widget was developed. These features will all be available in the release of Dojo 1.2.

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Welcome! If you are looking for a way to quickly and easily add great looking and functional charts and graphs to your web pages, you’ve found the right place. All you need is a tiny bit of JavaScript skills and a copy of Dojo.

In this two part guide, we look at how easy it is to get Dojo Charting up and running, and then examine in greater detail the options available for different looks for your charts. Today in Part 1, we start with a basic example and then examine all the options available in defining your plot type. Part 2 will cover the options available in defining the axes and data sets for your charts.

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As mentioned in Zooming, Scrolling, and Panning in Dojo Charting, our next goal to tackle was charting events. I am happy to announce that event support for Charting has landed in the Dojo trunk, and shipped with Dojo 1.2. It was the most requested dojox.charting feature, and I am excited that it is finally here!

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As mentioned in my previous post Dojo Charting Reorganization, this week I worked on zooming, scrolling, and panning of charts. It turned out to be a more complex task than I anticipated due to the little-known fact that Dojo Charting can stack multiple plots per chart and can show multiple independent axes on all 4 sides of the chart. These problems were solved and a new API was introduced on the chart object:

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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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