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Content Tagged with Dojo + page

Shane O'Sullivan has built a nice search mashup experience called Chofter. It uses all things Dojo, including:

• Layouts, Dialogs, Menus and ContentPanes for the user interface.
• dojo.data and dojo.rpc for data transfer.
• dojox.dtl (Django Templating Library) for transforming search data into visuals.
• dojo.fx and FisheyeLite for eye candy

Kris Zyp has created OfflineRest, a new module in Dojo 1.2 that allows for a simple offline pattern to building your application.

Dojo 1.2’s new dojox.rpc.OfflineRest module automates the local storage of data and synchronization by leveraging the Dojo Data and REST abstractions. The OfflineRest module augments the JsonRest service in Dojo such that requests are cached in local storage for offline access, and modification requests (put, post, and delete) modify the cache and are recorded for delivery to the server; immediately if online, otherwise when connectivity is restored. Furthermore, JsonRest is the core engine used by JsonRestStore. Consequently, you can simply use the standard Dojo Data API with the JsonRestStore and effortlessly add offline capability with no modifications to your data interaction code. The underlying Rest service automates the handling of caching, storing data locally, and syncing changes. In addition the new OfflineRest module has no dependency on plugins, but rather progressively utilizes offline features that are available, while still operating properly on legacy browsers without offline support.

He has a demo that involves a CRUD system for hiking trails which interestingly asked me for Gears permission, even though it appears that OfflineRest doesn't abstract on top of both Gears and the emerging storage standard, which is something I would like to see, to extend the reach.

Matthew Russell is blogging and screencasting work from Dojo: The Definitive Guide and has put together a piece on a simple, degradable reflection widget using dojo.gfx:

Reflection has been in vogue for a while now in user interfaces, and it wasn’t long ago that I saw a headline about a JavaScript library that streamlined a number of useful effects such as reflection — but alas, without the benefit of Dojo. Well, being the Dojo fanboy that I am, I immediately started to ponder how to accomplish some of these same effects using the dojox.gfx module, and a couple of hours later, I had prototyped a nice, degradable widget that seemed to do the job. By the way, that’s one of the things I love so much about Dojo: once you have a reasonable grip on it, you seldom, if ever, have to look somewhere else. More times than not, a great deal of your work is already done for you, and you just have to connect some of the dots. Remember: it’s all about the frameworks

But there’s always a catch: in this case it’s that IE users must have Silverlight installed for the widget to work; otherwise, it degrades back to the plain image. The reason is that VML, IE’s default gfx renderer, doesn’t support transparency in gradients. No transparent gradient, no nice fade out effect. Likewise, if JavaScript is not available (honestly, who does that?), it degrades down to the bare image. If you didn’t already know, the gfx module exposes an API that works across browsers by using whatever drawing engine is available. At the moment, renderers are available for canvas, VML, SVG, and Silverlight. That pretty much covers it. Adding support for another one should be straightforward: follow the API guidlines and write it.

The Silverlight requirement is interesting, isn't there a way to use IE behaviours to do a transparent gradient?

Watch the screencast to see it all in action.

Tom Trenka has a fantastic post on custom fonts with dojo.gfx that shows the SVG font definition implementation.

Part one of the article deals with painful, practical issues around the licensing of fonts. Tom discusses the various technical options out there, and then gets to the solution:

In general, the issues surrounding font usage have to do with the ability for someone to visit a web site, grab a specific file, and be able to reuse it without paying for a legitimate copy within any of the most commonly used programs (such as Office). Because of this concern, both the EOT and sIFR techniques work–because the fonts are embedded in a form that is not reusable in a common way.

One approach: the SVG Font Specification

Similarly, the SVG Font specification allows for the same concept—by working with a specific font definition, especially one that can be customized for the specific usage, the spec avoids most of the prickly issues surrounding licensing.

SVG fonts are relatively simple in concept; within the <defs> element, you define the main specifications of a font, and then you include specific glyph definitions. Optionally, you can include character-specific kerning information (the space between letters); some fonts include this type of hinting, and the SVG specification supports it.

Very impressive. If you are a typography wonk, then you have probably watched Helvetica: The Movie:

We talked a few months ago about something new we're doing at the Ajax Experience this year: the "Framework Summit." Basically, we're providing space for Prototype, jQuery, and Dojo to hold their own half-day events on-site, and these events are free and open to the general public.

Since we announced the summit, the frameworks have created their agendas for their events for their events:

Dojo Developer Day:

- Welcome, Introductions (Alex Russell, Dylan Schiemann)
- Tutorial - Progressive Dojo (Peter Higgins)
- Presentation - DojoX GFX and FX (Matthew Russell)
- Presentation - Secrets of DojoX (Tom Trenka)
- Tutorial - Getting going ... Zend + Dojo (Matthew O'Phinney)
- Tutorial - Dijit Layouts In and Out (Nikolai Onken)
- Tutorial - Reusable code, Widgeting (Peter Higgins)
- Community - Getting Involved (Peter Higgins, Nikolai Onken)
- Lightning Demos - What do you have? Show us.

Prototype Developer Day

- Welcome, Introductions (Prototype Core members)
- Contributing docs (Christophe Porteneuve)
- Contributing code (Andrew Dupont)
- Prototype & Performance
- Extended Q&A (Prototype Core members)

jQuery Developer Day

- State of jQuery (Rey Bango)
- Progressively Enhancing the User Experience Using jQuery (Karl Swedberg)
- An In-Depth Look at jQuery UI (Paul Bakaus)
- jQuery Team Code Review (jQuery Team)

Other Frameworks?

Some have asked why we didn't also include Framework X, Y, and Z at the summit. We have a simple answer: we only had room for three frameworks so we choose the three most popular frameworks (according to every survey we've seen). If the concept is successful this time around, we hope to do it on a bigger scale next year.

Obviously we hope you can make it to the entire Ajax Experience event, but if you can't do that, consider coming to one of the Framework Summit events. See you there!

Tom Trenka of SitePen has created a new top-level Dojo package called Deft which "focuses on ActionScript components created in support of the various projects within the Dojo Toolkit (mostly for DojoX). Deft source files are well organized based in part on the organization of other Dojo Toolkit projects, as well as the package structure required by the Flex compiler. Most Flex applications are based on the Flex AS3 Application class, which forces you to write at least one “controlling” MXML file in order compile your code. Instead of this, Deft components inherit primarily from the Sprite class — which allows you to write pure ActionScript code."

It contains a few goodies in it including the multi-image uploader, and pre-alpha quality support for dojox.gfx. Future plans include support for audio and video. "Hopefully Adobe will continue its current path towards being open source friendly, helping Deft flourish."

The article goes into detail on downloading the Flex SDK so you can build applications with it.

This is an interesting experiment in the melding of Flash and Ajax techniques. I would love to see the Flash player giving us more access via simple JavaScript, so we don't even need to create SWF bridges.

Brad Neuberg has built a very easy to use client side search tool called PubTools Search using Gears. The project is open source and provides a great avenue to share knowledge on Gears itself.

To accompany the code, Brad wrote a detailed article:

Did you know that you can use Gearsto do fast, client-side searching of data, similar to a client-side search engine? Gears bundles Full-Text Search (FTS) abilities right into its local, SQLite database. MySpace, for example, uses this feature with their MySpace Mail application, downloading all of a user's messages for fast, client-side search. Because all of the data is local, you can do nifty things like search over the data in real-time as the user types, something that is much harder if you have to query over the network to a server to do the searching.

Would you like to add the same kind of fast, local searching to your own web page and web applications? This article introduces you to PubTools Search and the Gears features that power it, namely Full-Text Search and Workers. PubTools Search is an open source JavaScript library that drops a client-side search engine right into your page. You configure it with basic HTML plus a list of URLs to index. Once loaded, a search form that uses the local Gears full-text search abilities will appear in your page to quickly and locally search over the documents in real time as a user types into the search field.

Brad sat down with me to discuss the project, some of the best practices, and his use of Dojo.

Dojo is a framework that you can bend for your needs. You have very fine grained control on what you want in your base dojo.js, how other components are loaded, and a final custom JavaScript file.

Brad Neuberg showed a project, SearchTools, that added local search via Gears, and had a custom Dojo that wasn't Dojo in a very small package.

Alex Russell has taken this further and explained how he got Dojo to 6k by implementing a stub loader, so many of the functions were lazy loading stubs instead of full method bodies.

His use case was mobile, or small embedded devices in general:

On an iPhone with a clean cache the stubbed-out dojo.js cut in half the time required to load and evaluate. Sure, it’ll take more time on the network when parts of the toolkit are actually used (say, in response to a click event), but for mobile device scenarios, it’s going to be hard to beat the flexibility and speed of the stub loader when pulling Dojo into a page.

The post really wasn't about Dojo per se, but John Resig parsed the sentence: "Even so-called “lightweight” libraries like jQuery" and in one part of a three part post hit back:

The way it's worded you would assume that you were paying a large, up-front, cost to using jQuery when, in fact, there is very little overhead. jQuery has been shown to be the fastest loading JavaScript library for non-cached code and considerably fast for cached code.

If we ignore the frameworks and think of the meta-point it is a lot more interesting.

Revin Guillen has posted about the Dojo dojo.data API and how you can layer access to Web services in a very elegant way.

His example shows building access to Wikipedia (demo):

Dojo recently received a new data store that demonstrates exactly what we want: dojox.data.WikipediaStore. It does just what it sounds like, turning Wikipedia into a simple object you can query from your code. Building it with Dojo’s handy dojox.rpc package makes for a simple, compact, DRY implementation.

In only four steps:

1. Create the web service object
2. Declare the new data store, inheriting from ServiceStore
3. Give it a fetch method
4. Give it a _processResults method

The service descriptor looks like: