While there are many challenges today with building web applications, there are also many options to address the issues we face with technology, process, and people, allowing us to reap the benefits of the web as an application platform. While many of the challenges with today’s web applications come from the vast array of technologies that are available, there are clear strategies that can be employed to turn those same issues into advantages that can make building applications easier.

Web applications provide many benefits. Most organizations seek to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes through the use of software.

One of the additions of the recent Dojo 1.11 release is a modern flat theme created with the Stylus preprocessor. The flat theme allows you to apply a modern, flat look and feel to existing Dojo applications.

Intern’s Leadfoot API makes it easier to author functional tests in JavaScript. One of the fundamental concepts for authoring functional tests is to access an element within a page to test it.

Peter Higgins, former project lead for Dojo, gave an excellent talk at JSConf in 2013 titled “Dojo Already Did That” (which reflected a humorous meme started at the first JSConf). It was highly informative about how Dojo had already solved problems that the JavaScript community were solving again in 2013.

Until a few years ago, our testing efforts with Dojo were focused on the Dojo Object Harness (DOH), a very early unit and functional testing suite. Developed by the Dojo Toolkit community nearly ten years ago, DOH’s main purpose was to provide functionality for unit testing JavaScript functions and custom widgets in a cross-browser compatible way.

If you’re familiar with Dojo 1, you’re probably familiar with declare. Declare provides a flexible but controlled way to handle inheritance in JavaScript.

QCon Beijing happened last week and I had the opportunity to travel and give a talk as one of the few American speakers. Most notably, all talks were delivered in Mandarin which was a bit of a challenge given that I don’t speak Mandarin.

Last fall, Mozilla announced its Mozilla Open Source Support program, specifically focused on supporting the Free & Open Source Software movement. AND THIS JUST IN: Intern was selected to receive a MOSS award in the amount of $35,000! Initially focused on awarding grants to fund projects used in its own development initiatives, Mozilla is giving back to the OS ecosystem by directly sponsoring development on these open source projects! With Intern specifically, the following improvements will be implemented: Performance with an emphasis on benchmarking and regression analysis Visual regression testing with screenshot comparison and image analysis Accessibility focused on analysis against known accessibility best practices The goal with each of these additions is to go beyond standard unit and functional testing and further automate the types of tests that developers should be running with each commit, to prevent regressions in their applications.