As Chief R&D Monkey here at SitePen, my work primarily revolves around ensuring that Dojo rocks for our customers and that we take what we learn from building apps and ensure that the toolkit evolves to encompass those lessons. Early this year it became clear that for folks building Dojo apps, the question of “what is Dojo?” was becoming increasingly hard to answer.

At last month’s Open Ajax Alliance meeting in New York, a good chunk of time was dedicated to revisiting what, if anything, OAA should do about “Mobile Ajax”. I’m something of a pessimist about what most people mean when they say “Mobile Ajax”, but the OAA meeting included several bits and pieces that gave me a lot of reasons to be less grumpy.

Apple’s iPhone has sparked a great deal of interest and excitement in mobile web application development. The iPhone significantly raises the bar for the capabilities of mobile devices.

At the beginning of 2007, we announced a collaboration with Brad Neuberg to develop the Dojo Offline Toolkit, and today we are pleased to announce the beta release! Several people have asked how and why we decided to do this, and how this relationship came about. From the SitePen perspective, our clients have an obvious need for offline web applications.

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.

InfoQ had an interesting article recently asking Is XML the Future of UI Development?. I believe that the author of the article is significantly underestimating the resourcefulness of JavaScript developers: The first up is AJAX, the poster child of the Web 2.0 craze.

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.

This is it folks! This is the last week of dev for Dojo Offline until we pop the Dojo Offline beta out the door, either later this week or on Monday, April 16th. Last week we finished the Windows installer for Dojo Offline.

We finished a bunch of big tasks last week, mostly having to do with fit and finish and our installers: * The Moxie demo for Dojo Offline used to take too long to load — it was loading about 27 resources on page load — we optimized this to about 3 resources on page load drastically improving page load time.* We created about 80% of a Windows installer using an open source toolkit from Microsoft called WiX. Unfortunately, WiXturns out to make easy things hard and hard things close to impossible, trying to turn XML into a programming language.