This past Friday, we pushed Dojo 0.9 Milestone Release 2 out of the nest. This is the last milestone before Beta and the system is starting to take a recognizable shape.

NEW YORK, NY (MARKET WIRE) April 30, 2007 – Directory publishing powerhouse Ambassador Publications, known for its explosive growth in the New York metropolitan market, has launched a proprietary, custom-built Internet bid management and reporting platform. The launch of Ambassador’s web-based software application solidifies Ambassador’s role as a leader in directional advertising, both on and off-line.

As Chief R&D Monkey here at SitePen, my work primarily revolves around ensuring that Dojo rocks for our customers and that we take what we learn from building apps and ensure that the toolkit evolves to encompass those lessons. Early this year it became clear that for folks building Dojo apps, the question of “what is Dojo?” was becoming increasingly hard to answer.

At last month’s Open Ajax Alliance meeting in New York, a good chunk of time was dedicated to revisiting what, if anything, OAA should do about “Mobile Ajax”. I’m something of a pessimist about what most people mean when they say “Mobile Ajax”, but the OAA meeting included several bits and pieces that gave me a lot of reasons to be less grumpy.

Apple’s iPhone has sparked a great deal of interest and excitement in mobile web application development. The iPhone significantly raises the bar for the capabilities of mobile devices.

At the beginning of 2007, we announced a collaboration with Brad Neuberg to develop the Dojo Offline Toolkit, and today we are pleased to announce the beta release! Several people have asked how and why we decided to do this, and how this relationship came about. From the SitePen perspective, our clients have an obvious need for offline web applications.

Until the release of GMail, much of the innovation in the world of Ajax (at that time known as DHTML and JavaScript) was occurring behind the scenes in corporate intranet applications. At one point, Alex Russell and I concluded that the “DHTML Dark Matter” was at least 10 times the size of the public-facing applications such as Oddpost that were available more than three years ago.

InfoQ had an interesting article recently asking Is XML the Future of UI Development?. I believe that the author of the article is significantly underestimating the resourcefulness of JavaScript developers: The first up is AJAX, the poster child of the Web 2.0 craze.

In the past two or so months that I’ve been an employee of SitePen, my main task has been to design and write the materials for the majority of our new training course offering’s including slides, activity handouts, working code equivalents, slide design (which in the end Torrey did, a brilliant job too), and other branding aspects. On top of that, I’ve had to design these materials in such a way as to allow any of the SitePen instructors to create a specific course in a minimum amount of time with the ability to cherry-pick among various topics all to give our clientele the best learning experience possible.