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Content Tagged with front + dojo

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.

Dylan Schiemann has a really nice case study post on implementing a Flickr badge with Dojo.

What is particularly interesting is how he starts with a simple version:

And then shows how he tweaks it for performance, explaining what he is doing along the way:

It is nice to see his thought process, and how you can start with functionality, and then go back and tweak away.

The team at Dojo have been really working hard to improve their documentation and put more information in the hands of Dojo developers. Between DojoCampus.org and the SitePen blog, they've really come a long way to providing solid education material for the Dojo community.

Normally, the Ajaxian Featured Tutorial consists of one really good educational piece but two really awesome tutorials were recently posted and I decided to give Ajaxian readers a two-fer:

Tutorial 1: Dojo Drag and Drop, Part 1: dojo.dnd

In the first part of this series, Revin Guillen takes you through the ins-and-outs of Dojo's drag and drop API named dojo.dnd.

What I really like about Revin's tutorial is his extensive code samples that reinforce the concepts. His demo code on building a drop handler, for example, is very extensive and concise allowing the reader to easily understand how to create the drop handler:

Tutorial 3: A Beginner’s Guide to Dojo Charting, Part 1 of 2

Next up Doug McMaster teaches you how to leverage Dojo's charting capability:

In this two part guide, we look at how easy it is to get Dojo Charting up and running, and then examine in greater detail the options available for different looks for your charts. Today in Part 1, we start with a basic example and then examine all the options available in defining your plot type. Part 2 will cover the options available in defining the axes and data sets for your charts.

Doug explains how to easily create charts by customizing the available 2D charts included in Dojo charting API. Code as simple as:

produces a nice chart like this:

Mike Wilcox has posted on Firebug Lite for Dojo and shows how he has taken it beyond console.log().

I was most excited about the DOM inspector:

Yes, I did say that a DOM inspector would imitate existing tools. However, I implemented this for a colleague who was struggling with a particularly nasty IE 6.0 bug one day (more like one month), as he expressed a wish to view the dynamic DOM to verify hover states in IE6 — the one browser without this tool. Because Firebug Lite already had some nice formatting built in with the dirxml() method, it was just a matter of grabbing the current event target from the onmousemove event, and displaying the result in its own section. The current target is outlined, and clicking on it makes it “stick”.

As much as everyone loves Firefox, the Dojo team is committed to the Open Web, which means encouraging competition amongst browsers. One way of fostering that competition is through debugging tools, such as Firebug Lite. We are trying to make it as easy as possible to code for large user-base browsers like Internet Explorer, or preferred browsers, like Safari or Opera, or… [your favorite browser here].