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.