The previous installment of the Dive Into Dojo series shows how easy it is to Dive Into Dojo Charting to get started with Dojo’s charting library. It comes with dozens of stylish themes you can effortlessly plug into any chart. But what if you want your charts to match your website’s design or business’ branding? No worries: Dojo’s charting library allows you to create custom themes!
Dojo Toolkit 1.5 is now available for immediate download. Dojo is a JavaScript toolkit that is lean enough for use on a simple blog, yet powerful enough to scale to solve the most advanced web application engineering challenges, allowing you to use just the features and flexibility needed for your application. The 11th major Dojo release, version 1.5 offers many important improvements and enhancements and remains as IP-safe, freely-licensed, and free to use as the first release over five years ago.
The REST architecture has become increasingly recognized for its value in creating scalable, loosely coupled systems. REST is presented as a network interaction architectural style, not a programming methodology. However, the principles of REST can actually be very meaningfully and beneficially applied in the programming realm. We will look at how the resource oriented approach of REST can be applied as principles for programming language usage and design. The motivation for looking at REST should be clear. Little in history has been as ridiculously successful and scalable as the web, and REST is a retrospective look at the principles that were employed in designing the core technologies of the web, particularly HTTP. Applying such proven principles to our application design will certainly be beneficial.
Roy Fielding’s REST architecture is broken down into seven constraints (and the four sub-constraints of the uniform interface). The individual concepts here are certainly not new, but collectively looking at these concepts as resource oriented programming may provide an interesting new perspective. I will also look at how these principles are exemplified in Persevere 2.0 in its object store framework, Perstore, and its web stack Pintura.
Dojo provides a feature-rich system for including JavaScript modules. Before we begin this journey to explore this concept in depth, you should know that absolutely no knowledge of the Dojo module, packaging, and build system are required to use Dojo.
You can easily get started using Dojo by using a script element referring to a copy of Dojo on the AOL or Google CDNs. If you want to host your own version of Dojo, you can easily download dojo.js, include it in a web page using a script element, and be off and running with Dojo Base.
For those new to Dojo, the following resources give a quick overview of Dojo Base:
In general, dojo.js is a lot like jquery.js or prototype js: you get a competitive set of features founds in most JavaScript libraries that are essential for building great web applications. Those features include:
There is so much existing information about the Dojo Toolkit that it can be challenging to know where to begin. The following is a Dojo curriculum (I use this term loosely) highlighting community resources and a logical path for self-learning the foundational parts of Dojo. If you understand the purpose of a variable and function, or you are new to Dojo, then this is for you.
General Interface (GI) recently joined the Dojo Foundation as part of a transition to a true comprehensive 100-point open source project. TIBCO open sourced GI a number of years ago, but now GI can enjoy the benefits of running under the Dojo Foundation and being integrated with the infrastructure for open SVN, bug tracking, and more. Not only is GI is part of the foundation, but GI now includes significant integration with the Dojo Toolkit. The powerful GI builder, a web-based visual IDE for building client side web applications, now is capable of utilizing Dojo widgets as well as the GI set of widgets.
TIBCO, Dojo Foundation and SitePen Work Together To Drive Innovation in Application Development
TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX), announced it has completed the Dojo approval process to donate TIBCO General Interface™ source code to the Dojo Foundation. TIBCO and the Dojo Foundation have established the General Interface project to give developers access to the award winning General Interface™ source code and promote the rapid creation of reliable Ajax applications, components and portlets with the look and feel of desktop graphical user interface applications.
Recently Dojo 1.3 was released alongside project PlugD which adds jQuery flavor to the Dojo toolkit. InfoQ has a Q&A with Dylan Schiemann, CEO of SitePen and co-creator of Dojo about the latest release, the evolution of the toolkit and TIBCO’s General Interface choice to join the Dojo foundation.
Sometimes building an application from scratch is easier than building on an already existing interaction model. For Queued, our goal was to take the Netflix user experience and port it to a lightweight desktop application, while adding some modest enhancements.
Creating an alternate interface for an already well-known web site carries some unique responsibilities. First, unless there is something seriously wrong with the original site, straying too far from the established model can be counterproductive. Second, innovating on existing features becomes more important than replacing them. And third, adding new interface functionality without obstructing existing interactions remains a crucial consideration.
For the Queued project, SitePen faced the additional challenge of showing off features of Adobe AIR that might not necessarily lead to the most fluid interaction, but which were powerful enough to merit inclusion as a demonstration of AIR’s powerful capabilities. We’ll discuss a few of our interaction changes here, though these aren’t the only modifications that we decided to implement.
With their announcement of the Pre last week, Palm has placed their bet that great mobile applications can be built using the same open web technologies that drive the desktop environment today. Web applications that run on modern desktop browsers are constantly pushing the envelope of the types of applications that no longer require a proprietary platform-specific SDK.
When Apple first launched the iPhone in 2007 their first answer to developers was similar to Palm’s new OS. Apple gave a long talks at its 2007 Worldwide Developers Conference about how you can build great applications using standard web technologies. Unlike Palm’s webOS the iPhone web SDK was severely lacking in many areas. Apple has corrected some of these shortcomings in the subsequent releases of their mobile browser. Mobile Safari now supports multi-touch gestures, basic rotation tracking, and hardware accelerated CSS animations. Unfortunately, Apple’s open web SDK still lacks many of the most critical features that would allow developers to build applications that take full advantage of the mobile environment.
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