Dojo 1.8 Talks at London Ajax

News,

Dojo Committers Kitson Kelly and Mark Wubben gave a pair of talks this week at the London Ajax User Group. Kitson gave an overview of the changes in Dojo 1.8, while Mark dove into his work on updating dojo/promise. In case you missed it, you can read the slides or watch the videos:

Slides

Videos

Thanks to Kitson and Mark for delivering these talks, and to SitePen and Skills Matter for sponsoring the event. If you’re ever in London, the group meets the second Tuesday of every month to talk about JavaScript and Ajax topics, with many Dojo users and committers in attendance.

Introducing new visualization components in Dojo 1.8

Announcements, News, , , , ,

Now that Dojo 1.8 beta is out, I encourage you to check out some of the new features in this release. There are three brand new visualization components for mobile (phones & tablets) and desktop browser platforms. Each of these components answers specific advanced needs in term of visualization and may be useful in your apps.

The first component I’d like to introduce is the calendar component. This is a full featured UI component that displays calendar events either in day, week,  month or yearly view. It its fully compatible with the dojo/store APIs and can be filled with any kind of data coming from your server. It is easily styled using CSS.

Dojo Calendar Week View

You can read more about the calendar component in the Dojo calendar beta documentation.

The second component is a fully redesigned gauges framework for Dojo that comes with several predefined gauges. With this new framework, creating your own gauges or customizing existing ones is now as easy as assembling predefined elements such as indicators, scales or tracks and connecting a few custom functions for custom drawings. Gauges can be horizontal, vertical, circular or semi-circular.

Dojo Custom Gauge

You can read more about the new gauges and their framework in the Dojo gauges beta documentation.

Finally, I’ll mention a pure data visualization analysis component, the treemap. This component displays data as a set of colored, potentially nested, rectangular cells. It can be used to explore large data sets by using convenient drill-down capabilities. It relies on data clustering, using areas and color information to represent the data you want to explore. Like the calendar component, it can connect to any dojo/store implementation.

Dojo Treemap

You can read more about the treemap in the Dojo Treemap beta documentation

We are looking forward to your feedback on these new components. Download the beta and try them out. You may send your feedback to the Dojo interest list or file any issues you may find.

Release bonanza! Dojo 1.4.4, 1.7.3, 1.8.0b1 released

Announcements, News

Hi everyone! I’m pleased to offer not one, not two, but THREE new Dojo releases for your consumption.

Dojo 1.4.4 is now available. This is a maintenance release that backports browser fixes to add support for Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4+. Information on which fixes were backported to Dojo 1.4.4 is available on the bug tracker. This is basically identical to the Dojo 1.5.2 release that happened…whenever that happened! A little while ago. Thanks to kgf for managing this release.

Dojo 1.7.3 is now available. This is a bugfix release that resolves several issues with the 1.7 branch of Dojo, including issues with the i18n subsystem, legacy modules, and the build system running on Node.js. It also fixes a significant performance regression from 1.6 when loading many legacy modules and includes bugfixes for several other components. The full list of fixes for Dojo 1.7.3 is available also on the bug tracker.

Finally, Dojo 1.8.0b1 is now available. This is the first beta of the new Dojo 1.8 release and includes several exciting new features. A blog post written by interim supreme overlord Dylan Schiemann provides an overview of many of the most significant new features and enhancements coming to Dojo 1.8. There are close to 700 new features, enhancements, and bug fixes in this release, including a brand new documentation parser (written by yours truly) that will make the API browser work correctly again. As usual, the running list of changes that have made it into Dojo 1.8 so far is at the bug tracker.

Dojo 1.8 is on track at this point for a release in mid-to-late July. Beta 2, if necessary, will be released in about three weeks. CDN releases for Dojo 1.4.4, Dojo 1.5.2, and Dojo 1.7.3 have been submitted to Google. I will post again once those are made available.

OK, that’s it from me! Have a great solstice weekend.

Dojo 1.8 release schedule

Announcements, News

In preparation for the release of Dojo 1.8, trunk is now in feature freeze, which means this code is considered feature complete for Dojo 1.8. This is the last step before a beta release. The release schedule is currently as follows:

Now: feature freeze
June 22: beta 1
July 13: release candidate 1 (note: if additional beta releases are necessary, each release will push this out by 1 week)
July 20: Final release (note: if additional rc releases are necessary, each release will push this out by 1 week)

Thank you to everyone that has helped make this release a success!

Dojo 1.4.4rc1 Released

Announcements, News

The first release candidate for Dojo 1.4.4 is now available for download.  The focus of this release is to backport IE9 and Firefox 4+ compatibility fixes, as seen in 1.6.1 and 1.5.2, to the 1.4 line.

Download: http://download.dojotoolkit.org/release-1.4.4rc1/
Backport ticket: http://bugs.dojotoolkit.org/ticket/15508

If you’re interested in testing this release, please do so and report any regressions promptly; the final release of 1.4.4 is planned for next Friday, June 22.  Thank you!

CometD 2.5 Beta 1 Adds AMD Support

Announcements,

The CometD project just announced their first 2.5 beta, which adds AMD support to their Dojo-based JavaScript client, as well as their jQuery client with an AMD loader.

The release notes contain full details. They have set things up such that it will work with AMD syntax, and still work with the legacy dojo.require/dojo.provide syntax.

If you are using the require/provide syntax, you need to register a module path prior to requiring dojox.cometd:

dojo.registerModulePath("org", "../org");
dojo.require("dojox.cometd");

For AMD applications, either use the “tlmSiblingsOfDojo: true” configuration attribute, or use a configuration object specifying the “packages” field and map that to the location of cometd.

CometD 2.5.x ships updated demos that you can use as examples:

* Dojo 1.7 AMD-style demo: the Reload demo, the Chat demo
* Dojo 1.7 non-AMD demo: the Echo demo, the TimeSync demo

Please report any bugs you find to the CometD issue tracking system.

For Dojo 1.8, we will remove dojox/cometd from the repo, and add an svn:externals to the CometD project source code.

Dojo Recognized at the Great Indian Developer Summit

Announcements, News, , ,

The Dojo Toolkit was recently selected as the 2012 recipient of an award for excellence in web development technology at the Great Indian Developer Summit. We are honored to receive this award. The conference has over 14,000 attendees, India’s largest tech event. Anuj Dubey and Lakshmi Sharma accepted the award on behalf of the Dojo Foundation.

The selection criteria for the award emphasized functionality, usability, innovation excellence, bleeding-edge features, and feedback from the developer ecosystem. The web development category specifically emphasized web development and deployment tools that are helping developers and designers push the boundaries of the web, which is consistent with one of Dojo’s primary objectives!