First Dojo security advisory in 2+ years, a number of great Dojo articles and tutorials, and many improvements.

Dojo 1.4.2

Dojo 1.4.2 is live. Regardless of the version of Dojo you are using, please read the full Dojo Security Advisory and upgrade your version of Dojo now. We have new versions of Dojo for 0.4, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 as well. The AOL and Google CDNs are also updated to resolve this security concern. If you have any issues with upgrading, please contact us.

New Community Tutorials and Demos

David Walsh has authored a nice News Scroller demo. Dojo the Definitive Guide author Matthew Russell has a tutorial on charting, USAID Data Charted with Dojo . Tom Elliott whom we met at Dojo Beer in London has created a great new explanation of using the Dojo build system.

Cody Lindley (SitePen) has authored a Learning Dojo blog post outlining the best resources available for someone new to learning Dojo. Kris Zyp (SitePen) has a number of interesting new blog posts:

• General Interface and Dojo integration
• Pintura JSGI modules
• Object Capability Model and Facets in Perstore and Pintura

eWeek has a nice write-up about Dojo user Coyote Point Systems.

A new XForms and Dojo-based rapid application development tool is available from BetterForm. “betterFORM allows easy creation of highly dynamic Web 2.0 user interfaces with attractive controls and layout. You can add validations, calculations, actions and events to build complete webapplications in a declarative way.” A demo is available.

Improvements to Dojo in trunk

Significant improvements were made from March 3rd to March 12th.

Nicola Rizzo has been improving DojoX’s effects using CSS3 animations, be sure to check out the demos.

James Burke (Mozilla Messaging), Mike Wilcox, Bill Keese (IBM), and Adam Peller (IBM) addressed the Dojo Security Advisory with fixes and new releases for Dojo 0.4, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4. Please upgrade now.

A number of other improvements throughout Dojo, Dijit, and DojoX were made by Bill Keese, Nicola Rizzo, Jared Jurkiewicz (IBM), and Doug Hays (IBM).

Recent Events

QCon London occurred this week (March 10-12). On the evening of March 11th there was be a Dojo Beer event with Nikolai Onken, Tobias von Klipstein, Sam Foster, and I. On March 12th, Nikolai, Torrey, and I gave talks on the Browser as a Platform track along with Joe Walker (Mozilla) and Simon Oxley (Aware Monitoring). Conference slides and video will be available on the QCon web site in the near future.

Upcoming Events

SWDC 2010 is coming up in June and is hosted by Dojo contributor Peter Svensson. It features a great line-up of speakers including a number of Dojo committers or contributors (Nikolai Onken, Wolfram Kriesing, Mark Wubben, and I). And Stockholm in early June is amazing.

Dojo Beer events are also coming soon in Washington DC (JSConf), Israel, Austin Texas (for SXSW) and more. Let us know if you want to schedule an event in your area.

This week’s highlights include preparations for Dojo 1.4.2 RC, Dojo-inspired CommonJS Utils, and many improvements.

Dojo 1.4.2 RC

A release candidate for Dojo 1.4.2 is being prepared. This release will
address this list of issues.

Please give it a try and help us find any potential regressions before it is release. If you find issues, please create an account if you don’t already have one, and login to
bugs.dojotoolkit.org

CommonJS Utilities

Kris Zyp has announced CommonJS Utils, a collection of tools for making it easier to work with CommonJS-compliant toolkits. Some of these tools are inspired by work in Dojo, including an observe pattern implementation similar to dojo.connect, or assistance for JSON schema which already has great support in Dojo and Persevere.

Documentation Improvements

We continue to make refinements and fixes to the incredible new collection of Dojo documentation. Thanks so much for your tremendous feedback. Just let us know here, on the mailing list, or in a bug ticket. Be sure to let us know the page where you see the documentation issue so we can fix it quickly.

New Community Tutorials and Demos

Charles Spraggs has a nice tutorial on creating fancy drop down menus, while David Walsh, known for his involvement with MooTools, has a couple of quick demos on link nudging and removing images which show how easy it is to do things with Dojo when you’re familiar with MooTools or jQuery.

Thanks for taking the time to write these up!

Improvements to Dojo in trunk

Development efforts from February 21st to March 2nd were focused primarily on stabilizations and improvements to Dijit by Bill Keese (IBM) including further refinements for new themes including refinements
to the AccordionContainer and TabContainer. James Burke (Mozilla Messaging) and Bill Keese improved our build process for not adding certain test files to production environments. Korean translation fixes
were contributed by Youngho Cho (Nannet) and by Adam Peller and others at IBM. Adam also added a fix for Norwegian translations. Eugene Lazutkin made minor fixes to DnD. Jared Jurkiewicz (IBM) continued his
frantic pace of perfecting the Editor widget and its plug-ins. Finally, Peter Higgins (Joost) added support for a new hover state on the close icon of the Dialog widget.

Upcoming Events

QCon London is next week (March 10-12). On the evening of March 11th
there will be a Dojo Beer event with Nikolai Onken, Tobias von Klipstein, Torrey Rice,
Sam Foster, and I. On March 12th, Nikolai, Torrey, and I will be speaking on the Browser
as a Platform track along with Joe Walker (Mozilla) and Simon Oxley (Aware Monitoring).

SWDC 2010 is coming up in June and is hosted by Dojo contributor Peter Svensson. It features a great line-up of speakers including a number of Dojo committers or contributors (Nikolai Onken, Wolfram Kriesing, Mark Wubben, and I). And Stockholm in early June is amazing.

This week’s highlights include a few new Dojo sites and steady improvements to Dojo.

Joost and Wall Street Journal

Joost, an early pioneer in online broadcast videos, has launched a completely revamped version of their platform with Dojo 1.4 as the basis for their new user experience.

The Wall Street Journal, the world’s leading financial news service, has updated their web site to make use of Dojo 1.4 (as well as Prototype and script.aculo.us).

Improvements to Dojo in trunk

This week’s development efforts were focused primarily on stabilizations and improvements to Dijit by Bill Keese (IBM). Adam Peller (IBM) made a number of translation resource commits for various Dijits. Mike Wilcox
contributed fixes for the UpgradeBar and FileUploader. Jared Jurkiewicz (IBM) further improved the Editor widget and its plug-ins. Finally, Doug Hays (IBM) contributed additional fixes for minor bugs.

A couple of minor changes were made to the API, moving a couple of Dijit APIs to Dojo Core to make them easier to use outside of Dijit:

• dojo.window.get() // Get window object associated with document doc
• dojo.window.getBox() // Returns the dimensions and scroll position of the viewable area of a browser window

This was an exciting week for the Dojo Toolkit project, with the dojo.connect online conference, and the unveiling of the completely redesigned web site.

dojo.connect

Approximately 150 people attended the 3-day dojo.connect online conference. Many talks were delivered by Dojo committers and users on a wide-range of topics. A couple of talks that I enjoyed in particular were delivered by Jared Jurkiewicz (IBM) and Nicholas Kolba (Thomson Reuters).

Jared gave an overview of the much improved Dijit Editor. This talk reminded me of Jared’s early talks on Dojo Data, which inspired the community to greatly embrace and contribute improvements to his work. The new editor is amazing and is now competitive with the best rich text editors in the market.

Nick’s presentation focused on performance testing and optimization for their platform in Thomson Reuters’ financial services division. He features some excellent work done in partnership with SitePen, to build better tools for testing performance, and explained how Thomson Reuters greatly improved the performance of Dojo and JavaScript in their application by having a great way to measure performance on an extremely granular level.

New web site

The previous web site was a frustrating experience for our community. After much effort by Torrey Rice (SitePen), with assistance from Nikolai Onken (Uxebu), Tobias von Klipstein (Uxebu), and Tom Trenka (SitePen), the first iteration of the new site was launched, and the initial community feedback has been incredibly positive. The new design is beautiful, the information architecture is easy to follow, and the foundation of the site will make it much easier for the community to contribute and improve the site going forward. The site was built with Dojo, Dojango and Django. It was a tough call on what technology stack to use, with so many great options like the Zend Framework also viable options. In the end, we chose Django because the developers working on the site prefer Python and Django to PHP and other options.

The site also integrates features and/or components from Nabble, Echo, Google Search, freenode IRC, Twitter, and others to provide a great experience for our community while leveraging what’s already out there. From here, there’s a lot of work to do to continue improving the site, which will evolve much more rapidly going forward.

Featured here: Your Amazing Dojo-based Application

If you have a great application that you and/or your company have built using Dojo, contact us as we’d love to feature it on the new web site.

Improvements to Dojo and Dijit in trunk

This week’s development efforts were focused primarily on stabilizations and improvements to Dijit by Bill Keese (IBM). The Noir theme was removed from trunk, but still exists in SVN if someone wants to revive and complete it, and the Lucid theme is there as well for anyone that wants to check it out. Nicola Rizzo and Mike Wilcox made some improvements to the CSS3-based experimental animation system, and Mike also fixed some IE issues with the UpgradeBar widget. Jared Jurkiewicz (IBM) improved the Editor widget and its plug-ins. Finally, Adam Peller (IBM), Chris Barber (CB1, Inc.) and Doug Hays (IBM) each contributed fixes for minor bugs.