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Why Type Annotations in JavaScript are a Good Idea
Why Type Annotations in JavaScript are a Good Idea

In March 2022, a Stage 0 proposal was announced that would add TypeScript-like type annotations to the JavaScript language. The utility and ergonomics of static types for JavaScript have been debated since before TypeScript’s inception; some developers feel that types add needless complexity to the language, while others feel that types add a much-needed safety net.

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JSConf US 2019: Pushing JavaScript Beyond the Browser
JSConf US 2019: Pushing JavaScript Beyond the Browser

As a first-time JSConf attendee, I happily embraced the welcoming culture and fun atmosphere – surfing, anyone? But I was even more impacted by the presentations centered around JavaScript expanding beyond the browser, using JavaScript to help others, and the focus on community. Of course I’m an avid JavaScript engineer and believer (why else would I be at JSConf), but I left feeling awed and inspired after seeing how progressive and impactful the JavaScript ecosystem can be.

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Augmented Reality on the Web in 2019
Augmented Reality on the Web in 2019

Augmented Reality (AR) brings digital information or media and interweaves it with our experience of the real world. In recent years Augmented Reality has become apparent in the consumer space in two major formats: head-mounted displays such as the Microsoft HoloLens and the Magic Leap along with more widely available experiences on mobile devices.

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Codemods: Effective, Automated Refactoring
Codemods: Effective, Automated Refactoring

Maintaining software is challenging. Stagnant software quickly becomes obsolete and this couldn’t be truer than in the JavaScript ecosystem.

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Cats vs Dogs: Answering the Important Questions
Cats vs Dogs: Answering the Important Questions

SitePen participates in a number of conferences around the world presenting new technology and ideas to engineers and designers. Recently Dylan Schiemann and Tom Dye spoke at the HalfStack Conference in London and Paul Shannon spoke at Phoenix TypeScript meetup.

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React Already Did That at All Things Open 2018
React Already Did That at All Things Open 2018

All Things Open is a large, community-created open source conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, with nearly 4,000 attendees and 20 concurrent sessions. At this year’s event, I was invited to deliver a talk similar to one I had presented at JSConf titled “React Already Did That.” The session itself is not actually about React, but about several key concepts in how the JavaScript ecosystem evolves.

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Node+JS Interactive 2018: From Accessibility to JS Interoperability
Node+JS Interactive 2018: From Accessibility to JS Interoperability

The 2018 edition of the Node+JS Interactive conference featured nearly 1,000 JavaScript and Node.js enthusiasts at the first combined event organized by the Node.js Foundation and JS Foundation. The event included nearly 100 sessions, panels, and community events designed to help grow and foster the JavaScript ecosystem.

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FullStack London 2018: Choosing a Framework
FullStack London 2018: Choosing a Framework

At this month’s FullStack London 2018, our CEO, Dylan Schiemann, presented the talk “Choosing a Framework”, based on our Choosing a Framework blog series. Given our long history in web development, we’ve seen JavaScript evolve from an obscure simplistic scripting language to the language of the internet.

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Web Components in 2018
Web Components in 2018

For many front-end developers, components have become a central concept in their development workflow. Components provide a robust model for architecting and scaling complex applications, allowing for composition from smaller and simpler encapsulated parts.

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A Quick Look at Nest
A Quick Look at Nest

Nest is a scalable framework for building server-side applications. It is authored in TypeScript and relies on the Express framework.

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CSUN ATC 2018: Attack of the Acronyms
CSUN ATC 2018: Attack of the Acronyms

Picture lots and lots of dogs wearing vests Now, are you thinking of a Lewis Carroll-esque canine tea party, or a collection of service dogs? If the latter, you may be ready to attend the thankfully-abbreviated California State University: Northridge Assistive Technology Conference (hereafter referred to as CSUN or #CSUNATC18). If you picture an impeccably-dressed doggy social occasion, you would also be ready to attend CSUN.

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Introduction to WebAssembly
Introduction to WebAssembly

WebAssembly is an emerging standard for a low-level assembly-like language in a compact binary format that runs with near-native performance, and is available as a compilation target for a variety of languages. We’ve heard significant misunderstanding around WebAssembly and what it means for the web and JavaScript.

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TSConf: The First TypeScript Conference
TSConf: The First TypeScript Conference

In case you missed it, SitePen was the presenting sponsor of the inaugural TSConf which took place in Seattle on March 12, 2018! The Backstory In 2017, we met the TypeScript team in person after years of being avid members and contributors to the TypeScript project. We asked them when the first TypeScript conference would be and they answered with: “Do you want to do it?” SitePen, along with various members of its team, has organized community meetups, sponsored conferences and have, of course, been speakers at many events, but this was the first time we had ever considered tackling an entire conference from start to finish.

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Web Frameworks: Community
Web Frameworks: Community

It is like the old proverb, “It takes a village to raise a web framework.” As we explored in the previous post, choosing a framework goes beyond the technical features of a framework and this is certainly true when it comes to the wider community, which includes considerations like licensing, how open the framework is, and where to turn for education and support. While each web framework we have been discussing is an open source framework, there is a wide spectrum of what that actually means and how it affects the use and future development of a framework.

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Blockchain Basics
Blockchain Basics

“Blockchain” is the newest term to enter the tech industry’s buzzword repertoire. Whether a company is processing sub-second banking transactions or transporting artisanal goat cheeses across state lines, it seems as though any company not investigating this technology, the same technology that powers infamous cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, will surely go the way of the dodo.

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Five of our favorite emerging web standards
Five of our favorite emerging web standards

As we create and improve open source software, and build many applications for our customers, we’re constantly looking for things that will improve the software we create. Part of this is looking at an often dizzying array of proposed and emerging standards, and finding those that feel efficient and ready for use.

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Web Frameworks: Common Usage
Web Frameworks: Common Usage

Previously on Web Frameworks, we looked at how various frameworks deal with the concept of applications. Akin to listening to the whole album, we got a sense of how the frameworks pull it all together.

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Web Frameworks: Applications
Web Frameworks: Applications

Applications built with web technologies, something that was a curiosity a few short years ago, have emerged onto the scene as a must have for most organizations. Transcending websites and providing users with a more open and unbounded experience, web applications are everywhere.

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Event Delegation: Pattern or Anti-Pattern?
Event Delegation: Pattern or Anti-Pattern?

A significant amount of work on JavaScript toolkits and frameworks has centered around trying to fix, normalize, and optimize browser implementations. Doing so requires making many assumptions about what the problems are, how our tools will be used by developers, and what we expect of the future.

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Web Frameworks: Foundational Technologies
Web Frameworks: Foundational Technologies

We have previously discussed the look and feel of web frameworks. While we often become interested in a framework based on the stylishness of the widgets and applications it can create, this may lead to a similar approach to how we have historically selected music.

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Web Frameworks: User Experience Design
Web Frameworks: User Experience Design

While instruments such as guitar and drums are part of a band, how they are used by the musicians define the style of the band’s music. Similarly, the elements of an application user interface connected together define the user experience.

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If we chose our JavaScript Framework like we chose our music…
If we chose our JavaScript Framework like we chose our music…

…we would all be using justin-bieber.js. We as an organization have been working with JavaScript since 2000.

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ECMA-414: Modularizing the JavaScript Standard
ECMA-414: Modularizing the JavaScript Standard

As we noted in our post about the open and incremental approach to TC39, one of the challenges facing TC39 is that it has grown in size substantially along with the community interest in JavaScript. ECMA has started to address this by creating a few additional standards bodies for sections of JavaScript that can be decoupled from the core language.

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The Law of Diminishing Returns
The Law of Diminishing Returns

Last month we looked at various approaches to scaling enterprise development, and the challenges found within development organizations in our Time for InnerSource? post. This month we continue looking at the need for InnerSource by taking a closer look at the Law of Diminishing Returns.

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Typings for dojox/gfx
Typings for dojox/gfx

dojox/gfx is Dojo 1.x’s vector graphics library, with support for SVG, Canvas, and other legacy rendering environments through a drawing API based on the semantics of SVG. This API also provides the foundation for dojox/charting.

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Making TypeDoc better
Making TypeDoc better

Over the past several months, the SitePen team has been hard at work on Dojo 2 along with the tools and infrastructure to support it. Part of that infrastructure, and one of the major priorities for Dojo 2, is to have top notch developer documentation, complete with examples, tutorials, and API documentation.

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Time for InnerSource?
Time for InnerSource?

InnerSource is a series of strategies and tactics from the open source world that help companies share source code across teams. While it might seem odd at first, it turns out that the things that work for well-managed open source projects are really helpful for businesses that want to encourage a culture of collaboration and reuse.

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The 5 features of ES8 and a wishlist for ES9
The 5 features of ES8 and a wishlist for ES9

As we near the finalization of the proposal, it’s looking like ES8 is going to deliver much more than the simple updates of its ES7 predecessor! We wanted to take a few moments to highlight our 5 favorite things about the upcoming 2017 release. This change is one we’re very excited about, and something we’ve already shimmed in Dojo 2.

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Functional reactive programming and Observables in JavaScript, TypeScript, and Dojo 2
Functional reactive programming and Observables in JavaScript, TypeScript, and Dojo 2

Functional programming and reactive programming principles are not new to JavaScript, but their adoption has recently become widespread across most modern frameworks and toolkits. The ease of using these approaches has improved as we’ve finally seen the decline of legacy browsers, and as we’ve seen the introduction of functional and reactive paradigms within ES6 and ES8.

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Moving 4-ward with Intern
Moving 4-ward with Intern

The motivation for Intern 4 is to make it easier to author tests with ES6+ features within tests, with or without transpilation. Want to skim? Here’s the Intern Roadmap which lists our high level status for each Intern release going forward.

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Introducing Milestone Mayhem
Introducing Milestone Mayhem

With years of building large scale web apps, we’ve experienced almost everything that goes right and wrong during software development projects. So we created Milestone Mayhem, a card game that reflects the challenges and successes with app development.

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New Year’s Resolutions for 2017!
New Year’s Resolutions for 2017!

As the new year starts to unfold, it’s time to take a quick look at the things our team at SitePen resolves to do this year. Too often, we see large enterprise customers who have multiple teams creating the same features, without having a simple way to share and maintain code over time.

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Intern Visual Regression Plugin
Intern Visual Regression Plugin

Thanks to a generous Mozilla Open Source Support program award, Intern has expanded its testing ecosystem to include new and robust sets of tools. Engineers can now easily write tests to benchmark sections of code, test for accessibility (a11y) support, and test for visual differences.

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Accessibility Testing with Intern
Accessibility Testing with Intern

Intern already has a wide array of capabilities and today we’re pleased to announce one more: accessibility testing. Thanks to a generous award from Mozilla Open Source Support we’ve created the intern-a11y plugin, which allows users to run accessibility tests on pages or components using Intern.

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Intern 3.4 Released
Intern 3.4 Released

Today we’re pleased to announce the release of Intern 3.4. This release brings usability enhancements and bugfixes, including a new benchmarking mode! We’ve outlined some of the features below, but as always, visit the release notes for more details.

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Web Summit Recap
Web Summit Recap

Now in its 7th year, Web Summit is the world’s largest web conference, with more than 50,000 people in attendance. The conference possibly draws inspiration from SXSW Interactive, with a European twist.

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Exploring WebVR
Exploring WebVR

This October, we delivered meetup talks on WebVR in London and Phoenix on the same day to share our early efforts in exploring WebVR with TypeScript, Dojo 2, Intern, and A-Frame. WebVR is an experimental JavaScript API that provides access to Virtual Reality (VR) devices, such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Samsung Gear VR, and Google Cardboard.

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Announcing the JS Foundation!
Announcing the JS Foundation!

The official name of the rebranded and relaunched merging of the jQuery Foundation and the Dojo Foundation is the JS Foundation. SitePen is excited to be a member of this new organization! Back in 2004, Alex Russell, David Schontzler, and I wrote the first lines of code for the Dojo Toolkit. Our early goal was to create the “next-generation DHTML toolkit” that would encourage usage and adoption by ensuring users and contributors they would receive a safe to use open source software.

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SafetyNet 2016 recap
SafetyNet 2016 recap

SafetyNet is an annual conference hosted by Pulsiam and is focused on trends in software for the safety industry. Because of our expertise in shaping the modern web and our ongoing work with Pulsiam’s application development efforts, I was invited to deliver a keynote about the past, present, and future of the web, as this industry begins to transition to web-based solutions.

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Solving complex dgrid edge cases
Solving complex dgrid edge cases

We were recently asked by the team at eQuorum to investigate an issue with dgrid performance when leveraging the dgrid/Tree mixin. The issue was challenging to solve, so we thought it would be useful to share our story in debugging and solving it.

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Improving TypeScript modules
Improving TypeScript modules

One of the main challenges with creating modern JavaScript web applications is the relatively incomplete approach to ES modules. As an interim solution until all necessary use cases are solved, many developers create source code with ESM, and then transpile to either AMD, CJS, or UMD for easy usage within today’s browsers.

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TypeScript 2.0 Awesomeness
TypeScript 2.0 Awesomeness

Over the past few years, TypeScript has iterated and greatly improved developer ergonomics. With our efforts on Dojo 2, we’ve been very excited about many of the features and improvements made, including several key improvements that have landed for TypeScript 2, which is currently in beta release! TypeScript 2 adds a major improvement in the type analysis of code.

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The long and winding road to Dojo 2
The long and winding road to Dojo 2

Recently on GitHub, someone accused Dojo 2 of being vapourware. This opinion came from a position of misinformation.

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Introducing intern-cli
Introducing intern-cli

Intern makes writing high-quality tests easier and now running the tests is even easier using intern-cli. This package provides an intern command that has a POSIX-like interface, using familiar flags and options like –help. It follows some conventions that make running Intern simpler, and provides plenty of inline help.

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FullStack 2016
FullStack 2016

FullStack is a large London JavaScript conference hosted at the Skills Matter CodeNode. The conference brings together an impressive line-up of speakers and workshops covering five tracks over three full days of festivities.

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Building Better Enterprise Web Applications Part 3: SitePen solutions
Building Better Enterprise Web Applications Part 3: SitePen solutions

In this installment of our series on building web applications, we look at the SitePen approach to solving challenges in web application development. We employ all of the solutions described in part 2 of the blog series.

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Building Better Enterprise Web Applications Part 2: Solutions
Building Better Enterprise Web Applications Part 2: Solutions

While there are many challenges today with building web applications, there are also many options to address the issues we face with technology, process, and people, allowing us to reap the benefits of the web as an application platform. While many of the challenges with today’s web applications come from the vast array of technologies that are available, there are clear strategies that can be employed to turn those same issues into advantages that can make building applications easier.

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Building Better Enterprise Web Applications: Challenges
Building Better Enterprise Web Applications: Challenges

Web applications provide many benefits. Most organizations seek to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes through the use of software.

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Dojo is Doing it Again
Dojo is Doing it Again

Peter Higgins, former project lead for Dojo, gave an excellent talk at JSConf in 2013 titled “Dojo Already Did That” (which reflected a humorous meme started at the first JSConf). It was highly informative about how Dojo had already solved problems that the JavaScript community were solving again in 2013.

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Intern wins Mozilla award!
Intern wins Mozilla award!

Last fall, Mozilla announced its Mozilla Open Source Support program, specifically focused on supporting the Free & Open Source Software movement. AND THIS JUST IN: Intern was selected to receive a MOSS award in the amount of $35,000! Initially focused on awarding grants to fund projects used in its own development initiatives, Mozilla is giving back to the OS ecosystem by directly sponsoring development on these open source projects! With Intern specifically, the following improvements will be implemented: Performance with an emphasis on benchmarking and regression analysis Visual regression testing with screenshot comparison and image analysis Accessibility focused on analysis against known accessibility best practices The goal with each of these additions is to go beyond standard unit and functional testing and further automate the types of tests that developers should be running with each commit, to prevent regressions in their applications.

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On the leading Edge
On the leading Edge

I attended the Microsoft Edge Web Summit in San Francisco. I will be honest, outside of meeting a few people, I wasn’t expecting much.

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Intern test suite and CI updates
Intern test suite and CI updates

We’ve recently made a number of updates to Intern, providing additional flexibility and integration for writing and running tests. Seth Holladay and sitecues by Ai Squared generously sponsored some of these efforts! Intern has long supported continuous integration, officially supporting travis-ci, Jenkins, and TeamCity.

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dgrid 1.0 Released!
dgrid 1.0 Released!

It’s been over a year since the release of dgrid 0.4, which brought about some major changes, including integration with the new dstore API. Since then, we (and others) have used it in numerous applications, and we’ve continued to refine it.

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JSConf Last Call
JSConf Last Call

Last weekend at the Omni resort on Amelia Island, FL, the last JSConf US took place. The Williams family is no longer able to run this conference, so with much sadness it will not be continuing in its current form.

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Nodevember — A Community JS Conference
Nodevember — A Community JS Conference

I recently attended Nodevember, a two-day JavaScript conference down in Nashville, TN. My love for JavaScript motivated me to take my attendance a step further and volunteer.

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October jQuery Foundation board meeting
October jQuery Foundation board meeting

In mid-October, I attended my first jQuery Foundation boarding meeting. In case you missed the news, we announced in early September that the Dojo Foundation and jQuery Foundation are merging.

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Twitter Flight Recap
Twitter Flight Recap

I was recently invited to attend the Twitter Flight conference in San Francisco! While this conference is clearly focused around Twitter products, this year included mobile and data tracks which covered the Fabric mobile SDK and the GNIP enterprise API platform. Overall they did an amazing job creating the conference, giving me a great opportunity to meet new people and attend some engaging talks.

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Connect-JS: Quickie Recap
Connect-JS: Quickie Recap

I had the pleasure of attending Connect-JS in Atlanta this past weekend and had a great time speaking, attending talks and meeting some very talented people. Connect-JS totes itself as being a low-cost, community conference that brings in recognized experts from around the world.

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Code Coverage for TypeScript and Other Transpiled Languages
Code Coverage for TypeScript and Other Transpiled Languages

Transpiling or compiling code has become a necessity today for JavaScript-based web development. Whether you are using TypeScript, Babel, Dart, Traceur, or CoffeeScript to provide additional language features, or trying to optimise your code with the likes of UglifyJS, r.js, or Closure Compiler, once you have modified your source code, you start to run into challenges.

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Introducing Intern Recorder
Introducing Intern Recorder

Intern Recorder is a new Chrome Developer Tools extension that makes creating functional tests for Intern faster and easier. The Recorder automates test creation by recording your interactions with a page in Chrome and converting those interactions into a test file that can be downloaded and added to your Intern test suite.

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Intern 3 is here!
Intern 3 is here!

Today, we’re very happy to announce the release of Intern 3! This newest version of Intern is a culmination of several months of effort to overhaul the primary portions of the test system in order to provide a more stable and robust platform for building future features and enhancements. The biggest blind spot for Intern’s self-tests in Intern 2 was the code in client.js and runner.js that actually set up the environment and kicked off testing.

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We’re Contributing to Dojo 2!
We’re Contributing to Dojo 2!

At the end of 2014, we looked ahead to determine where to focus SitePen’s open source efforts in the coming year. After our successful contributions to dgrid and the new dstore package, it became increasingly clear that contributing to the future of Dojo was where our team would have the biggest impact and the most fun.

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Memory Consumption: the Externality of Programming
Memory Consumption: the Externality of Programming

Performance is a critical part of most applications. Research continually shows that good performance is essential for a good user experience.

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From DOH to Intern: Updating Dojo core’s tests
From DOH to Intern: Updating Dojo core’s tests

One of the primary motivations for creating Intern was to make support for continuous integration testing much easier to achieve with JavaScript-based application development. We recently converted the vast majority of the unit tests in Dojo core from DOH to Intern, in order to streamline the process of regression testing patches for Dojo 1.x.

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The road to Intern 3
The road to Intern 3

We normally try to schedule new minor releases of Intern about once every four to six weeks, but when we are working on a major release, there will often be a larger than usual gap in the release cycle. In order to keep our users informed of what’s going on, we wanted to write about what we’ll be doing over the next six to twelve weeks for Intern 3, during which time there will be no new releases (except for possible critical patch releases).

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Robust JavaScript Application Architecture
Robust JavaScript Application Architecture

In October, 2014, I was coerced invited to deliver a talk at the first FullStack conference in London, a conference focused on Node.js, JavaScript and hackable electronics. The conference was an interesting cross-section of all things related to JavaScript.

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Intern 2.2 released
Intern 2.2 released

Today we’re pleased to announce the release of Intern 2.2. Along with improvements to existing functionality and a few bug fixes, this release includes a new console-mode reporter that provides a more detailed view of the testing process and improved rendering of differences between objects.

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EdgeConf San Francisco 2014
EdgeConf San Francisco 2014

At many conferences, the hallway track is more interesting than the track during presentations. It’s the serendipity of a small group of people interested in solving a similar problem that run into each other and just start talking through it that makes the hallway track the most interactive experience at most conferences.

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Intro to Intern webcast
Intro to Intern webcast

Last month, we conducted a live webcast to provide an Introduction to Intern, SitePen’s open source testing framework. Our webcast covered: An overview of Intern’s numerous functional and unit testing features and capabilities Mocking objects and data Injecting dependencies Troubleshooting Future direction of Intern While it’s too late to attend this webcast and heckle us with live questions, we recorded the session and have made it available for you online: We encourage you to use Intern in your current application and then tell us about your experience.

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Working with Dojo and AMD in Production
Working with Dojo and AMD in Production

In our recent post on dgrid and Dojo Nano, we showed a technique of using nested require statements in order to make use of optimized layers using the Dojo build system. As a refresher, a layer is Dojo’s terminology for a file that combines many JavaScript resources into a single file.

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Dojo 1.8 Documentation Highlights
Dojo 1.8 Documentation Highlights

With Wednesday’s release of Dojo 1.8, there are many exciting improvements to check out! Our top goal for this release was to significantly improve the quality of Dojo’s documentation. SitePen proudly contributed in the following areas: Helped make many of the more than 500 fixes to our documentation based on community feedback (thank you!) Helped improve the content found in the reference guide Developed a brand new, extensible JavaScript-based documentation parser, which we use to generate output for the API viewer Updated 70% of the existing Dojo tutorials to be accurate for Dojo 1.8.

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Now Supporting all Major Toolkits!
Now Supporting all Major Toolkits!

We have been providing JavaScript and Dojo support to freelancers, start-ups and Fortune 500 companies for nearly a decade. As we intently watch enterprise organizations everywhere begin to roll out AMD (read about why AMD matters) and the associated code improvements, we are thrilled with the industry’s direction toward toolkit interoperability! Why? Because! Our masterful engineering team, consisting of influential members of various open source communities, positions SitePen perfectly to offer full-on, front-end web development support to the world! Getting right to the point, (The Official Point!), we are pleased to announce the expansion of SitePen Support to officially include more than fifteen popular open-source JavaScript toolkits! Now supporting the following JavaScript toolkits: Dojo Persevere packages dgrid Curl.js CometD Twine jQuery Backbone underscore RequireJS PhoneGap/Cordova MooTools jQueryUI Wire Socket.IO Express In addition to toolkits, we will continue to support your custom JavaScript source code, as well as key underlying technologies and formats, including JSON, HTML5, WebSockets, SVG/Canvas, Mobile Web, Server-Side JavaScript, AMD, Node.js and many more.

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AMD for the Business-Side
AMD for the Business-Side

You may have seen our recent blog entitled “AMD: The Definitive Source” which exhaustively explained Asynchronous Module Definition. AMD is a topic with significant technical nuances but the purpose of THIS article is to explain the value of AMD for your business.

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AMD: The Definitive Source
AMD: The Definitive Source

As web applications continue to grow more advanced and more heavily rely on JavaScript, there has been a growing movement towards using modules to organize code and dependencies. Modules give us a way to make clearly distinguished components and interfaces that can easily be loaded and connected to dependencies.

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18 things to look forward to in Dojo 1.8
18 things to look forward to in Dojo 1.8

After many months of work, Dojo 1.8 Beta is almost here. We expect beta to be ready for use on June 22, 2012, with the final 1.8 release due 4-6 weeks later! We’re very excited about this release for many reasons.

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Only two stops left!  Phoenix Mobile Festival and IBM Impact 2012.
Only two stops left! Phoenix Mobile Festival and IBM Impact 2012.

Over the last few weeks, Dylan has given talks across the western United States and Europe and we’ve tracked his every move on our blog. Dylan will finish his trip with stops in Tempe, AZ and Las Vegas, Nevada.

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Dylan presents AMD at London Ajax
Dylan presents AMD at London Ajax

Continuing on his road trip, Dylan presented AMD in Depth at the London Ajax User Group meeting on April 10th.   Over 80 optimistic and energetic developers attended the engaging presentation. Want to learn more about AMD?  Check out the presentation on our SlideShare page.

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Eleven Trends for 2012: The Year of Dojo
Eleven Trends for 2012: The Year of Dojo

Most 2012 trend lists include 12 trends. (Get it?  12 in ’12.  Of course you do.).

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Rich Web Experience 2011 – And so it was!
Rich Web Experience 2011 – And so it was!

SitePen’s Dylan Schiemann delivered the last of his three Rich Web Experience 2011 presentations yesterday, Never Bet Against the Open Web. Dylan had this to say about his time at #RWX2011: The level of interest in AMD, object stores, and mobile is impressive.

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SitePen’s Dylan Schiemann to Keynote at Rich Web Experience 2011
SitePen’s Dylan Schiemann to Keynote at Rich Web Experience 2011

SitePen’s CEO, and co-founder of the Dojo Toolkit, Dylan Schiemann will be kicking off Rich Web Experience 2011 with an engaging Real Time, Real Fast keynote address.  His talk will cover WebSocket, one of the hottest new APIs in HTML5, which enables true duplex communication without the overhead, complexity, and extraneous latency of HTTP-based solutions.  His keynote will also cover the use of streaming abstractions to minimize buffering, and will consider the performance implications of topic-based publish-subscribe distribution versus filtering techniques. On Wednesday, November 30, Dylan will present Dojo 2.0: Modular, Mobile, and Reinventing Web App Development.  This presentation will cover the reinvention of the Dojo Toolkit, one of the original Ajax toolkits.  Through a series of improvements in modularity, performance, API improvements, adjustments for HTML5 and mobile platforms, the Dojo Toolkit will continue to provide a stellar platform for building web apps.  Dylan will show off the wide variety of features and approaches currently available in Dojo, and give a sneak peak of the forthcoming Dojo 2.0 release.

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Dojo Toolkit Wins 1st Runner Up-2011 Packt Open Source Awards
Dojo Toolkit Wins 1st Runner Up-2011 Packt Open Source Awards

SitePen is excited to announce that Dojo Toolkit has won 1st Runner Up in the 2011 Packt Open Source Award for Open Source JavaScript Libraries!  Congratulations to all of our competitors- jQuery, RaphaelJS, Sencha (ExtJS), and YUI Library.  It was an honor to compete with this elite group of libraries.  Thank you to everyone who voted for Dojo Toolkit .  And most importantly, thank you to everyone who continues to believe in the greatness of Dojo. About the Open Source JavaScript Libraries Award Dojo Toolkit competed in the category is reserved for JavaScript libraries, libraries of pre-written JavaScript controls which allow for easier development of RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), visually enhanced applications or smoother server-side JavaScript functionalities.  Voting took place between September 19 and October 31, 2011..

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SitePen at BlackBerry DevCon Americas 2011
SitePen at BlackBerry DevCon Americas 2011

Featured as one of three sessions to see on Monday’s web track at the BlackBerry DevCon Americas conference in San Francisco this week, SitePen’s CEO Dylan Schiemann presented Make Beautiful Apps Faster Using the Dojo Mobile Toolkit.  His session talked about creating superior experiences using standard open web technologies and presented an overview of the Dojo Toolkit, HTML5 and mobile-specific features and new Dojo APIs that fundamentally change web application development for the better.

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Can Flash Thrive Going Forward?
Can Flash Thrive Going Forward?

The short answer: Yes, if it changes its strategy to one that embraces and augments the open web ecosystem, rather than continuing down the path of trying to compete with or replace it. With the recent anti-Flash, pro-HTML5 buzz caused by the iPad and sites like YouTube offering HTML5-enabled video alternatives, I thought it would be useful to share my thoughts on the opportunities and struggles Adobe faces with the Flash platform.

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Gears is Dead?  Long live Gears!
Gears is Dead? Long live Gears!

It was recently reported that Google Dumps Gears for HTML5. If true, with the investment Google has made in HTML5, Chrome, Chrome OS, and Chrome Frame, this is not surprising, but it does leave a potential short-term gap for offline application development.

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Persevere 1.0
Persevere 1.0

Persevere 1.0 is now available for download. Persevere is a JavaScript storage and application server that uses a standards-based interface of HTTP/REST, JSON-RPC, JSONPath, and REST Channels.

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Why We Love Chrome Frame
Why We Love Chrome Frame

Google today announced Chrome Frame, a plug-in that selectively upgrades Internet Explorer without breaking existing sites. Think of it as working like Flash, but for open web technologies, replacing Internet Explorer’s entire rendering engine for sites that include a single meta tag indicating that they would prefer to use Chrome Frame rather than IE.

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Queued: Architectural Decisions
Queued: Architectural Decisions

Dojo is a very flexible toolkit; it doesn’t dictate how you organize your code or create your widgets. It simply provides tools, and it’s up to you to decide how you want to fit them together.

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Queued Overviewed
Queued Overviewed

Last month, we announced Queued, an open-source application for managing your Netflix Queue. Queued is a desktop application created with web technologies and techniques including the Dojo Toolkit, and it is distributed as an Adobe AIR application to provide several performance boosting benefits from living on the desktop.

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Announcing Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR
Announcing Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR

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.

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The Dojo Toolkit and Deft
The Dojo Toolkit and Deft

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.

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JSONQuery: Data Querying Beyond JSONPath
JSONQuery: Data Querying Beyond JSONPath

Notice: We recommend reading our newer post on RQL. A new data querying tool for has been added to Dojo 1.2.

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Dojo Toolbox First Look
Dojo Toolbox First Look

In the middle of May, we were given a mission: create a speedy, offline API documentation viewer and a graphical Dojo build tool. Here we are at the beginning of July, and the result is the Dojo Toolbox 1.0.

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JSON Referencing in Dojo
JSON Referencing in Dojo

Non-trivial data often has structures that cannot be well-defined with normal linear, acyclic data descriptions. Data that consists of cycles, many-to-one relationships, and non-local references often requires custom strategies for serialization and transfer of the data over JSON.

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The Latest from SitePen Labs
The Latest from SitePen Labs

We’re pleased to announce the two latest projects from SitePen Labs: Paver and Persevere! Paver exists because of SitePen’s Kevin Dangoor, and his work on the SitePen Support web application. We found that the build tools that exist with Python just aren’t all that easy to use.

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Porting Dojo Methods to Flash – Part 3 of 3
Porting Dojo Methods to Flash – Part 3 of 3

This is the final part of our three part series on porting Dojo methods to Flash. In part one of our series, we implemented Dojo’s hitch method, and then used hitch in part two, where we made our connect method.

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Porting Dojo Methods to Flash – Part 2 of 3
Porting Dojo Methods to Flash – Part 2 of 3

Adobe recently announced their new Open Screen project, which opens the licensing of the Flash Player and much more. We’re celebrating this event with a three part series on Dojo and ActionScript and previewing some of the work by the Dojo team.

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Porting Dojo Methods to Flash – Part 1 of 3
Porting Dojo Methods to Flash – Part 1 of 3

There’s been some breaking news from Adobe, announcing their Open Screen project. As of today, they are opening the licensing of the Flash Player, FLV/F4V video, publishing the AMF protocol and device APIs for the player, and more.

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Unit Testing Custom Code with the Dojo Objective Harness
Unit Testing Custom Code with the Dojo Objective Harness

Notice: We now recommend the DOH replacement, Intern. Read our posts about Intern for more information.

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Dojo 1.1 in the News
Dojo 1.1 in the News

Since Dojo 1.1 was released a week ago, several outlets have published articles: Dojo 1.1 Refines Ajax Development – Features SitePen’s Peter Higgins and Alex Russell with their thoughts on Dojo 1.1, and a comprehensive summary of what’s new with the 1.1 release Dojo Stabilizes Open Source Ajax Toolkit – Mentions Dojo backing from IBM, Sun, AOL and Nexaweb, and gives a summary of IBM and Nexaweb’s opinions of Dojo 1.1 Dojo Encourages Ajax Innovation – The facts aren’t particularly solid in this one, but it’s still nice to see Dojo get mentioned Adobe AIR for Linux – Mentions Dojo working on AIR What’s new with Google Gears – Includes a short section about Dojo Storage and the Gears Dojo data provider. .

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Flash, Silverlight and the Open Web
Flash, Silverlight and the Open Web

Brad Neuberg, of the Gears team, took a stab at defining the “Open Web”. We at SitePen are very strongly in favor of the Open Web concept, because it’s the Open Web that has gotten us what we have today and will ultimately lead us to the best “web of the future”.

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