Blue Sky On Mars

Rey Bango at Ajaxian says that “This is a “must-have” for Dojo developers.”. I also enjoyed jdalton’s comment “I totally love this. I don’t even use Dojo and I totally love this. Well done :)”.

Adobe AIR evangelist Ryan Stewart mentions that “it’s basically 100% Dojo”. I did get an email from someone who was curious about what it’s like to create an AIR app using JavaScript. It’s really just like creating any JavaScript-intensive webapp, except you only target one, very capable browser engine (WebKit) and have additional APIs available for things like files, sqlite databases and native windows. Everything you know about web development translates very nicely.

Alex Russell mentions that we were able to port James Burke’s excellent work on the Rhino-based build tool that comes with Dojo. James did a great job on Dojo’s build system. Had he structured things differently, or not written the build system in JavaScript, it would have been difficult to impossible to create the Builder tool. But, as it was things fell into place fairly neatly. We need to get a patch together against Dojo’s build scripts and then the Toolbox will be able to share the code with the Rhino build directly.

Vote us up on DZone!

Peter Higgins, who was quite involved in the development of the Toolbox, put his take up on dojotoolkit.org.

And for the German speakers among you, here’s a take on the Toolbox for you. Vielen dank!

Today, we unveiled a project that I’ve been quite busy with the past few weeks: The Dojo Toolbox. Check out my First Look article to learn more about it or watch my 5 minute screencast:

The short story is that it’s an Adobe AIR-based app, built with Dojo itself, that gives you a zippy offline API documentation viewer and a graphical user interface for running Dojo builds.

This was my first interaction with the development side of AIR and my overall impression is quite good. The APIs are nicely done, and only having to target WebKit is quite a blessing.

Of course, I’m better known for my Python projects than JavaScript-related projects. In this case, we are using Paver to manage our builds and we also have Python code that processes the API documentation and generates the search index.

My colleagues and I had a great time putting this together. Thanks to SitePen and Adobe for sponsoring this project!

My latest substantial blog post is now up: SitePen Blog » Easy, Repeatable Building/Deployment of Python+Dojo Projects

Dojo on the client and Python on the server make for a great combination. They’re easy, productive and powerful. In this article, I’ll show you how to use Python + Dojo to cut the number of requests to your server by 95% and simplify development and deployment while you’re at it.

Alex Russell picked out a few great highlights from the new Dojo 1.1 release and has a nice little essay on open source to boot:

I could go on for a long, long time about what’s great in Dojo 1.1…but I’ll spare you most of that. James, Pete, Dylan, and the release notes can give you a strong sense of why Dojo 1.1 is the most polished, fastest, and easiest-to-use release of Dojo we’ve ever done. For the impatient, you can already start using it from the CDN without downloading anything.
[From Continuing Intermittent Incoherency » Dojo 1.1: Some Awesome For You App]

Dojo is reaping the rewards of having spent a lot of time getting their infrastructure together. 1.1 really improves so many parts of the package.

(ObDisclaimer: I’m not directly involved in the Dojo project myself, but I work directly with core Dojo folks at SitePen.)

I have recorded a screencast of my PyCon 2008 talk and put the code for the demo app online. Check it out on the SitePen Blog » Rich UI Webapps with TurboGears 2 and Dojo Screencast.

A few days ago I posted a brief blog entry about what I’ve been working on: SitePen Support (Dojo, DWR, Cometd)

We finished the work for the initial launch of this service immediately before I left for PyCon, so I didn’t have a chance to properly blog about it. Getting SitePen Support going has been my primary task in the time since I joined SitePen, so I’m anxious to write about it now that it’s public.

I’m going to start with some of the rationale for the service, and in another post at a later time I’ll talk about how the service is put together.

Imagine that you’re a developer who is facing a deadline or you’re a manager with a team that’s about to become stalled because of an unexpected problem. When working with most open source projects, you’ve got three mighty tools at your disposal:

1. the documentation
2. the source
3. the community

I don’t know how many open source projects you’ve looked at, but #1 is almost always not quite where you want it to be. The unusual situations that are likely to trip you up the most are also the least likely to be documented… so, there’s always #2. Dive into the source directly and check it out for yourself. Of course, Dojo is more than 100,000 lines of JavaScript. Even though it’s nicely organized, there are some tricky concepts being applied and it can definitely take some time to get to your answers.

Which leaves the community. Generally, community support is pretty good at helping you find an answer via forums, mailing lists and IRC. Unfortunately, though, you never know for sure that you’ll get a response from the community, and if you toss a really tricky problem out, project developers might not go after it if they’re in the middle of other big projects.

Now, for Dojo, DWR and Cometd, there is a definite place you can turn for help: the SitePen Support service. SitePen Support is a way for you to bring core project people into your development process when you need them most. All of the plans give you hours of assistance to track down the tricky issues or fix bugs that are important to your projects. They all have a guaranteed initial response, so that you know we’re there keeping an eye out for you. Many of our plans have a feature called “Ask the Experts”. If you can’t find something in the docs, Ask the Experts is a way to find the answer, and we’re even likely to update the docs if need be. For some of the plans, we’ll even troubleshoot and fix your application’s code in addition to the project code.

We’ve also been working on making the service as easy to use as possible. In addition to being able to exchange information via email, we’ve got a Dojo-powered interface for keeping track of what’s going on with all of your support requests.

It’s this interface that I’ll be writing more about later.

If you’re using Dojo, DWR or Cometd and would like some expert help for your projects, check out:
http://www.sitepen.com/services/support.php?packages

I’m at PyCon right now and don’t have much time to blog (I really try to maximize my limited conference time). But, I can’t go without bringing attention to: SitePen Blog » Commercial Support Now Available from the Co-Creators and Contributors of the Dojo Toolkit, DWR, and Cometd, because this is what I’ve been working on lately.

SitePen Support is the first “product” that I’ve worked on at SitePen (services can be products, too). We’ve got a great service to offer to people using the Dojo, DWR and Cometd open source projects and I’ll have more to talk about soon. We’ve been doing some really cool stuff with the UI for our support service, and this tied in directly with the talk that I gave at PyCon yesterday. That talk will be online sometime soon.

Intriguingly, Ajaxian seems to have the news first: Ajaxian » DWR joins the Dojo Foundation - Joe Walker joins SitePen. I haven’t used Java in 3 years, so I haven’t had a chance to use DWR, but it looks like a nicely designed API for doing Ajax and Comet in Java apps. Having Joe Walker join up at SitePen is great news indeed, and DWR is quite an addition to the Dojo Foundation.

Update: Ahh, that’s more like it. The word is officially out: the SitePen press release, the SitePen blog (which has considerably more w00ts than the press release) and Joe Walker himself announcing it.

I’m an early riser, usually starting work around 7AM Eastern. Today is no exception, despite the fact that this is my first day at my new job. I was surprised to find Alex Russell online when I started up this morning, but this explains it all: Dojo 1.0 has been released. Dojo 1.0 is huge (and yet compact… 23K core!) and powerful. Congrats to everyone who worked on this release!