As we kick off 2008, I’m pleased and extremely excited to announce that we’ve added some awesome, new talent to the SitePen team. Eugene Lazutkin is highly respected in Dojo circles for his work on Drag-n-drop, GFX (2D and 3D), Charting, and many other crucial 0.9 and 1.0 features.

In response to recent articles by Andy Clarke and David Baron, Alex recently said that the W3C cannot save us. The most significant point being made is that you cannot standardize the future, and you should not punish those who attempt to push the envelope through experimentation and invention.

Palo Alto, CA – SitePen, Inc., a leading provider of Ajax and Comet web application services, today announced the opening of SitePen Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of SitePen, Inc. SitePen also announced that Joe Walker, creator of Direct Web Remoting (DWR), has signed on as director of support and development for the newly-established UK operations.

Google released the first preview of Android today. It is chock full of features and a great emulator, but there was one interesting omission.

You’ve probably heard of Kevin from his work on the TurboGears Python web framework. We’re fans of that work and his approach with TurboGears, namely taking great components and integrating, documenting, and polishing them for real-world use.

Chris Mitchell of IBM had a few days of free time prior to the Dojo 1.0 release, and so he added Canvas support for dojox.gfx. While Canvas does not offer all of the DOM goodness of SVG, it does have one key features: it works today on the iPhone.

In addition to the panel discussion and keynote which the Ajaxians were gracious enough to let me participate in. I also gave a “regularly scheduled” talk on Dojo 1.0, many of the lessons we’ve learned leading up to it, and the philosophy of construction (and why it benefits you and your users).

Recently, the first draft of the new Dojo Grid made its way into the DojoX trunk. There’s still a significant amount of work to complete prior to the Dojo 1.0 launch date of October 31, but if you update your subversion checkout to head, you can follow along at home.

I can only imagine what kind of a political nightmare it must have been for the IE team to pull this off, but they deserve praise for finally liberating their browser from the clutches WGA (whose “advantage” has always been unclear). When it became clear that IE 7 was going to be tied to WGA in an early beta, it left a lot of angry developers scratching their heads.