Recently, using the Deft project, I created a multi-file uploader Flash component for DojoX. It uses a typical design pattern: embed a hidden SWF in the web page, and with the ExternalInterface, trigger the FileReference’s browse() method to open a system dialog.

The programmers in the trenches of Web development can breathe a bit easier now that a major committee planning the future of the JavaScript standard has decided to focus on small, incremental changes that will improve the performance in Web browsers. Some members of the ECMA International standards committee still have bigger dreams to enhance the language, known more formally as ECMAScript, to tackle more complicated projects, but these plans receded as the group focused on clearer and more present needs.

Ajax, which was been a key goal for integration into the Zend Framework in the last release, also gets a boost. The Dojo Framework which is a popular Ajax library, will now be directly integrated into Zend Framework 1.6.

A new top-level package was recently added to the Dojo Toolkit called Deft — an acronym for Dojo Experimental Flex Technology. The Deft package was created and is maintained by SitePen’s Tom Trenka, taking advantage of Adobe’s new MPL licensing, and the corresponding APIs of the Flash Player.

Google and Yahoo have JavaScript APIs that let you perform searches. Wikipedia has a JavaScript API that lets you grab data from its pages.

The Dojo Toolkit is a modular open source JavaScript library, designed to ease the rapid development of JavaScript or Ajax-based applications and web sites. InfoQ had a Q&A with Dylan Schiemann, CEO of SitePen and co-creator of the Dojo Toolkit, about AJAX, Comet, Bayeux, RIAs and the newly released Dojo Toolbox.

The window.name transport is a new technique for secure cross-domain browser based data transfer, and can be utilized for creating secure mashups with untrusted sources. window.name is implemented in Dojo in the new dojox.io.windowName module, and it is very easy to make web services available through the window.name protocol.

It seems that the Dojo toolkit will continue supporting IE 6 for a long time to come as Dylan Schiemann, CEO of SitePen and co-creator of Dojo tells us: When first released, Internet Explorer 4.5, 5.5, and 6 radically improved the lives of web developers with cutting edge features, but it has been 7 years since IE 6 was released. Today, I estimate that developers collectively spend billions of dollars in salary working around buggy behavior in IE.

Prior to the popularity of the web, client/server applications often involved the creation of native applications which were deployed to clients. In this model, developers had a great deal of freedom in determining which parts of the entire client/server application would be in the client and which in the server.