All posts by Dylan Schiemann

About Dylan Schiemann

Known for things called Dojo, SitePen, and Comet.

Winter 2014 Dojo Events

Events

There are a number of Dojo events this winter. We hope to meet you at one of these events:

Meetups

  • Phoenix JavaScript. Dylan Schiemann. March 19, 2014. Phoenix. Free registration required.

Training Workshops

Let us know if you’re speaking at an event, and we’ll add you to our listings!

Dojo 1.9.2 and more

Announcements

We have a number of December announcements.

Dojo 1.9.2

Dojo version 1.9.2 is now available for immediate use. The most prominent changes are:

  • Support for IE11
  • Support for W3C Pointer Events API in touch-enabled components (necessary for IE11 support)
  • Fixes for modern Firefox and Chrome
  • Fixes to star-mapping and aliases when using built layers
  • Fixes to sorting Date objects in dojo/store/Memory and other stores that use SimpleQueryEngine
  • Fixes to Dijit pop-up scrolling when using the scrollbar

Full details of the Dojo 1.9.2 release are available on the mailing list. We expect to have backsupported IE11 support available for Dojo 1.8 within a few weeks.

Help wanted: Migrating DOH tests to Intern

As many of you know, Intern is our replacement for DOH for Dojo 2.0. In order to make it easier for us to test and maintain multiple versions of Dojo, we are starting the process of replacing all existing DOH tests with Intern tests in the 1.x codebase. If you would like to get involved, please volunteer to assist in migrating tests. We will post additional instructions shortly on how to get involved.

Dojo training workshops

SitePen is running a December promotion with a free Dojo 101 workshop when registering for any of their Dojo 201 or 202 workshops in 2014. They are also offering both free 101 and 201 to the first person to register for all 3 workshops in each city on their calendar. Read the full details on this Dojo workshop promotion. The full Dojo workshop schedule for 2014 is also available.

The road to Dojo 2

The road to Dojo 2 is underway, and we have a substantial amount of work to complete to achieve our goals. Many early efforts have started towards building the best possible JavaScript toolkit. If you are interested in helping with Dojo 2, we encourage you to get involved by contacting us via the mailing list or on IRC.

Needs More Dojo plugin for JetBrains’ IDEs

Announcements

The following is a guest post from Christopher Folger, creator of a Dojo plugin for the JetBrains IDE. Thanks Christopher for sharing information about your plugin.

Needs More Dojo is a plugin that provides awareness of Dojo’s AMD system and object model to the IDE. Its main purpose is to simplify the management of the imported modules array (and corresponding function parameters) in a define block.

For example, instead of typing “dijit/layout/ContentPane” and adding a “ContentPane” parameter, Needs More Dojo lets you type “ContentPane” then inserts the correct module path and parameter for you into the existing list of imports. As you are writing code, when you reference an AMD module, you can use a hot-key to import the module instead of adding it manually. It will also flag unused modules with a strike-through and allows you to remove all unused modules at once.

Apart from this, it has several other features:

  • Allows you to organize, remove duplicates, or move items in a module’s list of imports via hot-keys or menu items
  • Highlights mismatches between an imported module and its parameter
  • Scans your sources and updates module references in define blocks when using the move/rename refactoring actions
  • Detects and optionally highlights cyclic dependencies
  • Allows navigation to attach points in modules that use _TemplatedWidget and i18n resource keys when using dojo/i18n!
  • The upcoming release provides support for require blocks in addition to better navigation to modules, methods, and this.inherited references

Needs More Dojo is listed under the JavaScript category of the JetBrains plugin repository, which you can access in the IDE. Alternatively, you can visit the Needs More Dojo plugin directly.

It is open-source and is currently under development. Any feedback or feature requests are always welcome and can be made on GitHub

Autumn 2013 Dojo events

Events, ,

There are a number of Dojo events this autumn. We hope to meet you at one of these events:

Meetups

  • London Ajax. Dylan Schiemann and Kitson Kelly. October 14. London. Free registration required.
  • Desert Code Camp. Dylan Schiemann. November 9. Chandler, AZ. Free registration required.

Training Workshops

Let us know if you’re speaking at an event, and we’ll add you to our listings!

Case Study: Buildspace

Case Studies

The large companies that use Dojo are widely known. This series features lesser known users of Dojo, and their stories. This time, we interview Ahmad Hazli Hasmi from Buildspace, a Kuala Lumpur-based web based app for the construction industry

BuildSpace Bill Manager

Q: Why did you choose Dojo?

A: When we first started this project, we were battling to find a good JavaScript framework that can help us to develop our product. One of our major hurdles was to develop grid that can behaves like Excel (able to view large data, formula, row linking, display HTML, etc). We’ve gone through quite a number of libraries and toolkits until we decided to go with Dojo. Reasons are simply because Dojo grid comes with good, solid and rich features that we can extend to meet our requirements. The lazy loading is an awesome feature. We able to load and display 100 columns with 4000 over rows in a single grid without any issue on the browser. It is also pretty easy to extend modules and with XHR handlers and Deferreds, we managed to get what we want on our app and it removed a lot of headaches through out development periods. Basically with all the fantastic widgets, we are able to develop a solid application not just in term of the functionality, but also with a great UI.

Q: Were you previously using another toolkit?

A: During R&D, before we officially started to develop Buildspace, we spent a lot of hours finding a suitable library. We have experience with all kinds of libraries and toolkits like ExtJS, Backbone, and jQuery. At the end we decided to use Dojo as our base.

Q: How does your application use Dojo?

A: Our application consists of 2 parts, back-end and front-end. We use PHP for our back-end that basically will do all the heavy duty work (handling requests, calculations, database transactions, authentication). On the front-end, it is 100% Dojo. We write a very minimal HTML layer, where all of our HTML is actually part of the widget templates. There is no HTML rendering from the server-side, it is all done on the client-side and AMD plays a major role here..

Q: Overall what is your experience with Dojo?

A: We all love it! Dojo comes with a solid and extensive features and above all that, it comes with great documentation which really helps us a lot. With our current system architecture, we are now able to split our team into two, front-end and back-end, where the front-end team is purely a group of Dojo ninjas.

Q: What’s your favorite thing about Dojo?

A: Dojo grid is the first reason why we chose Dojo. The features and its extensibility really helped us in developing our application. AMD is another great thing that we love. The modularity and flexibility of AMD helps us to decouple our application so our developers can focus more on their expertise in developing the app.

Q: What are your future plans with Dojo?

A: We are planning to upgrade our current Dojo 1.8.3 to 1.9 and to maintain our code base in sync with the latest version of Dojo as we benefit from its improvements. We are also planning to come out with a mobile version which probably will ride on Dojo Mobile.

BuildSpace Project Breakdown

Thanks!

Thanks Ahmad for telling us about your experience with Dojo. Please also check out the Buildspace demo (username: [email protected] , password: demo123) or review a series of demos and tutorials! If you would like to share your experience, please contact us.

Chrome 29 and Dojo 1.4-1.6

Announcements, News

If you’re using Dojo 1.4, 1.5, or 1.6, you’ll need to update to the latest patch to fix a regression with the release of Chrome version 29.

Ticket 17400 has the details on the fix.

You can get the patch from GitHub for your particular version of Dojo, and this fix will be included in the next release for each of Dojo 1.4.x, 1.5.x. and 1.6.x.

If you are already using Dojo 1.7 or newer, this fix already exists within your code base.

Case Study: Halvtone

Case Studies

The large companies that use Dojo are widely known. This series features lesser known users of Dojo, and their stories. This time, we interview Martin Stadler from Halvtone, a Germany-based platform for creating unique art from your photos.

Q: How did you first learn about Dojo?

A: In my previous job at excentos I was working on the single-page app framework and app implementation of their product advisors. They chose Dojo in 0.4 times for its rich and extensible widget system and the liberal license and while the system changed quite a bit during the years, Dojo still proves to be a solid foundation.

Q: Why did you choose Dojo?

Thanks to previous good experiences, Dojo is always a candidate when choosing a toolkit. In this case, everybody involved in front-end development worked with Dojo before so the choice was much easier.

Dojo provides us with most of the features we need for the Halvtone app so we didn’t have to integrate other libraries and manage dependencies. We love how Dojo is 100% AMD so there is a modular and consistent code base, still no build process is needed while developing and debugging in the browser just works as expected.

Q: Were you previously using another toolkit?

A: We have experience with all kinds of libraries and toolkits like jQuery, ExtJS, Backbone, Ember. For Halvtone we decided to use Dojo from the start.

Q: How does your application use Dojo?

A: The website consists of a few static pages and its heart, the Halvtone application.

The user interface of the app consists of custom widgets based on Dijit classes like _WidgetBase, _TemplatedMixin, _WidgetsInTemplateMixin, and _Container. Some Dijits such as Select, CheckBox, and ValidationTextBox are used for the forms. There’s two main widgets – Application and SceneManager – that manage all other components and routing utilizing dojo/router. The data and network layer’s structured is a store manager and a bunch of stores inheriting from dojo/store/JsonRest using dojo/store/Memory. While all animations are done with CSS3 transitions and not much library help, some of the important ones have a JavaScript fallback using Dojo’s animateProperty. The has API helps doing browser and feature sniffing (e.g. browsers without canvas support and very old versions of Firefox are not supported and a fallback message is displayed).

For the static pages the new dijit/_AttachMixin comes in super handy. The template is rendered on the server as part of the page’s HTML and then parsed by the widget when it is ready. This way the widget code is structured as usual leading to a consistent and easy-to-read code base while there’s no flickering when loading the page.

The code is structured into two packages, one for the app and one for the static pages. The build is configured in the same way creating a layer for each while common code goes into the dojo (boot) layer.

We use Dojo 1.9 and plan to upgrade to the latest version frequently (we started with 1.8) as upgrading our relatively small code base is usually easy.

Q: Overall what is your experience with Dojo?

A: Dojo is solid and extensive. Features and components added to Dojo core or Dijit are of high quality and usually follow known best practices or will become best practice by other projects incorporating them soon after. Most things needed for an application are included in equal quality and style.

The situation with application frameworks (MVC, routing, etc) still seems to be a bit weak so we used the existing components to build our own structure.

The loader and build system give us all the flexibility and optimization we can wish for.

Q: What’s your favorite thing about Dojo?

A: Pure modularity and flexibility due to AMD. Saves so much headache in the long run.

Q: What are your future plans with Dojo?

A: We will follow the development of Dojo for this project and will stay up-to-date as long as we benefit from improvements. Depending on business plans we would love to look into moving more into the mobile world, too.



Thanks!

Thanks Martin for telling us about your experience with Dojo. Please also check out Halvtone! If you would like to share your experience, please contact us.

Case Study: BeakPi

Case Studies,

The large companies that use Dojo are widely known. This series features lesser known users of Dojo, and their stories. This time, we interview Iain Hamilton from Esri, creator of BeakPi, a home automation system using Dojo and Raspberry Pi.

BeakPi Desktop

BeakPi iPhone BeakPi iPhone Screenshot

Q: How did you first learn about Dojo?

A: I first ran into Dojo when I began working for Esri seven months ago. Until then during my years of freelancing I’d only ever dabbled with frameworks when a job called for some bug resolving. I had developed applications using other language frameworks, but when it came to JavaScript, for some unexplainable reason I always enjoyed the challenge of reinventing the wheel and using small libraries I’d devised for handling tasks.

Q: Why did you choose Dojo?

With enjoying the daily exposure to Dojo at work, the reasoning became obvious and the madness of my previous years became clear. Seeing how rapidly it allowed for you to accomplish tasks and not require thoroughly testing in every browser on every 17th line was impressive.

Both the code and styling uniformity the Dojo Dijit widgets offer makes even the smallest of interactions look polished and professional, my favorite styling being the Claro theme. The XHR handler and deferreds remove a lot of ache that would have cropped up if attempting to handle my project without Dojo. I knew developing my project with Dojo would guarantee a smoother experience and a final product less prone to problems requiring fixing.

Basically I chose Dojo as all the more tedious issues that I had experience of handling could be dealt with in a less barbaric form, allowing me to smartly put together a neat application.

Q: How does your application use Dojo?

A: As seen in the video, the application user front-end is built using mostly Dojo 1.9 in AMD format. There are a few wee PHP scripts for system communication with the Raspberry Pi as well as the Mopidy JS websocket script, but apart from that it’s purely Dojo. It makes good use of various Dojo Dijit widgets for the interfaces as well as the XHR tools for communication.

Anyone connected to the local network can load the Raspberry Pi IP in their browser and through the Dojo interface begin controlling the Pi audio output. The interface seamlessly works on all devices, from laptop to smartphone. Via the offered interactions of the browser application, the Mopidy service backend, the Spotify Rest API and MPC application users can search, queue, skip and view tracks.

Q: Overall what is your experience with Dojo?

A: I’d say that considering I use it at work everyday and also in my hobby programming its pretty clear that I love it! It did take me a short time to get to grips with some of the practices used within Dojo in reflection of coming from the blank canvas approach with my JS programming, however it really was worth it. I look forward to moving my project to the next stage with Dojo.

Q: What’s your favorite thing about Dojo?

A: Being able to get your ideas on page fast and with no cross browser stress. For example I wanted to add a seekbar and volume bar to the interface, I pull in dijit/form/HorizontalScrollbar and periodically update its position by polling and filtering the media player system response. Some slight modifications to the style and done. It’s rapid, stress free and looks pretty damn sweet instantly.

Q: What are your future plans with Dojo?

A: Apart from working on some more of the audio player features, the next part of my home automation project is controlling household devices. I’ve just recently got communication between the Dojo application, a PHP TCP socket streamer and a RF controller plugged into the Raspberry Pi working. This currently allows for turning a lamp on and off via XML packets. My plan is to setup a back-end database and add some timer controls with Dojo, allowing for a bedside fan to be toggled on and off in the middle of the night.

Thanks!

Thanks Iain for telling us about your experience with Dojo. If you are interested in getting involved, fork the BeakPi GitHub project. If you would like to share your experience, please contact us.