As 2008 wraps up, there are a number of announcements and noteworthy items surrounding Dojo, DWR, Persevere, and SitePen services. Dojo was recently updated to version 1.2.3.

I’ve just completed the upgrade of the DojoX FileUploader to make it compatible with Flash Player 10. The FileUploader widget allows for the uploading of more than one file at a time, which is surprisingly still not supported natively by any web browser on the market today.

The JsonRestStore is a Dojo Data store that provides a JSON-based RESTful interface to servers and implements the Dojo Data read, write, notification, and identity APIs. One of the core concepts of a REST architecture is hyperlinking, and this is available in the JsonRestStore through it’s referencing support.

Is it time to bring your team up to speed with Ajax, Open Source, and the real technologies of the web? Or perhaps you want to increase your marketability in a tough economy. Or maybe you’re looking to allocate a small portion of your company budget to continuing education.

I’m excited to announce a new BSD-licensed project created by SitePen and co-sponsored by Adobe: Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR. This new effort creates a new namespace, dair, making it even easier to create rich desktop apps, such as the Dojo Toolbox, using the Dojo Toolkit and Adobe AIR.

Security in Ajax web applications is of growing importance. While the client-server model is very useful for architecting web applications, the web security is model is not client-server, but rather a client-deputy-server model.

I gave a talk on Dojo Wednesday at ZendCon, and when I walked into the room for the talk, there was some disorder as the conference center staff were taking out the tables to fit more chairs in. Even with the extra space, the room was totally packed, thanks in large part to the amazing Dojo integration work that the Zend team has done.

Recently, using the Deft project, I created a multi-file uploader Flash component for DojoX. It uses a typical design pattern: embed a hidden SWF in the web page, and with the ExternalInterface, trigger the FileReference’s browse() method to open a system dialog.

The programmers in the trenches of Web development can breathe a bit easier now that a major committee planning the future of the JavaScript standard has decided to focus on small, incremental changes that will improve the performance in Web browsers. Some members of the ECMA International standards committee still have bigger dreams to enhance the language, known more formally as ECMAScript, to tackle more complicated projects, but these plans receded as the group focused on clearer and more present needs.