Hey Dojo'ers! I am pleased to announce I just cut the official 1.4.0 beta2 release, available for early testing. Please give it a spin, test against existing applications and report any issues back to us at bugs.dojotoolkit.org. Barring any unforeseen regressions we should have the final release ready on schedule for a "near-Thanksgiving" release (in the past, though not intentionally, we've always released our finals on-or-around American national holidays, and 1.4 is looking to be the same).

We just released our [first] beta for dojo 1.4. There are a lot of new features in this release and we are really excited about it. Please help us test it, particularly for regressions from 1.3. There are too many changes to mention here but they include a bunch of new plugins for the Editor, a lot of new functionality for the Grid (called EnhancedGrid), scrolling tab labels, and a number of enhancements for the Tree. Bill

Thanks to work from Becky and David at IBM in ticket #6430, we can finally remove the underscore from dijit._Calendar. The underscore was there all this time, even though _Calendar itself was a functioning standalone widget, because it did not meet dijit's policy that all widgets must be accessible. DateTextBox has always used the Calendar code as a popup, but strictly speaking, the user did not need to use the calendar to navigate dates, so dijit._Calendar was officialy a private implementation for the DateTextBox form widget.

If you are attending the Future of Web Apps conference in London and want to learn more about Dojo, join us for the following events: * October 3: Dojo Beer London: all-day long, free, with presentations and hacking, basically BarCamp meets Dojo Developer Day. SitePen and Uxebu are co-hosting, with other Dojo committers also planning to attend. * October 5: Intro to Dojo Workshop, an excellent Dojo workshop taught by SitePen's Sam Foster and Dylan Schiemann.

Courtesy of Club AJAX member Donald Smith and his company Espree Solutions, we'll be presenting a live video feed from DDD in San Francisco on Thursday, Sept 10th, and from Phoenix Sept 12th. The page is posted on Club AJAX. The video will start when we get there! Also watch for our Tweets and Tweet Pics on Twitter/clubajax!