As Dojo moves toward its 2.0 release, our focus has been on giving developers tools that will help them be productive in any JavaScript environment. This means creating consistent APIs across all environments.

With Wednesday’s release of Dojo 1.8, there are many exciting improvements to check out! Our top goal for this release was to significantly improve the quality of Dojo’s documentation. SitePen proudly contributed in the following areas: Helped make many of the more than 500 fixes to our documentation based on community feedback (thank you!) Helped improve the content found in the reference guide Developed a brand new, extensible JavaScript-based documentation parser, which we use to generate output for the API viewer Updated 70% of the existing Dojo tutorials to be accurate for Dojo 1.8.

Want an easy way to keep up with SitePen efforts on Dojo, dgrid, AMD, JavaScript, and the open web? Then click the Keep In Touch button at the end of this blog and sign up now! To see what types of things you can expect, check out the July edition of the SitePen Insider! With the SitePen Insider, we provide a concise monthly recap of things that are new and noteworthy. It’s targeted at software engineers and technical managers.

SitePen was contacted by FieldAware when CTO Andronikos Nedos was tasked with building a highly interactive, bespoke, work scheduler widget using Dojo. Through our consultation, it was discovered that in order to integrate all of the features required, from user-configurable zoom levels to drag-n-drop to timeline mappings to fast rendering times, a custom JavaScript widget would need to be built.

Linus Ekström of Stockholm-based EPiServer shares his early dgrid experience with SitePen. Here’s what he had to say.

Dojo 1.7 added full support for asynchronous module loading, defined with the widely adopted asynchronous module definition (AMD) format. The new module loader and module format offer faster module loading, better performance, and wide interoperability.

We have been providing JavaScript and Dojo support to freelancers, start-ups and Fortune 500 companies for nearly a decade. As we intently watch enterprise organizations everywhere begin to roll out AMD (read about why AMD matters) and the associated code improvements, we are thrilled with the industry’s direction toward toolkit interoperability! Why? Because! Our masterful engineering team, consisting of influential members of various open source communities, positions SitePen perfectly to offer full-on, front-end web development support to the world! Getting right to the point, (The Official Point!), we are pleased to announce the expansion of SitePen Support to officially include more than fifteen popular open-source JavaScript toolkits! Now supporting the following JavaScript toolkits: Dojo Persevere packages dgrid Curl.js CometD Twine jQuery Backbone underscore RequireJS PhoneGap/Cordova MooTools jQueryUI Wire Socket.IO Express In addition to toolkits, we will continue to support your custom JavaScript source code, as well as key underlying technologies and formats, including JSON, HTML5, WebSockets, SVG/Canvas, Mobile Web, Server-Side JavaScript, AMD, Node.js and many more.

As a SitePen customer, Øyvind Aaraas of KLP decided to try out dgrid on one of his company’s web applications.   When asked about his early experience with dgrid, here’s what he had to say! SitePen: How did you learn about dgrid? KLP: We follow the SitePen blog and learned of it there. SitePen: Why did you choose dgrid? KLP: Because dgrid was easy to work with, easy to style and extend and has very quick rendering in all browsers.

You may have seen our recent blog entitled “AMD: The Definitive Source” which exhaustively explained Asynchronous Module Definition. AMD is a topic with significant technical nuances but the purpose of THIS article is to explain the value of AMD for your business.