Blue Sky On Mars

My latest article is up on the SitePen Blog: Inside the Dojo Toolbox. I walk through some of what we encountered while building the Dojo Toolbox AIR application. If you’re thinking of building an AIR application, particularly using JavaScript, check out this look at the technology.

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!

This Wednesday, I’ll be at the Refresh Detroit meeting for “demo night”. I’ll be showing off the Dojo and Python-powered user interface for SitePen’s Support service. Hope to see you there!

eWeek has just posted an article about SitePen: SitePen: Passing the Open-Source Torch

Open-source participation helps SitePen amass an all-star team of Web developers.

SitePen is full of fantastic people, really. It’s a great example of a business built on the success of open source project leadership and contribution.

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.