This is it folks! This is the last week of dev for Dojo Offline until we pop the Dojo Offline beta out the door, either later this week or on Monday, April 16th. Last week we finished the Windows installer for Dojo Offline.

We finished a bunch of big tasks last week, mostly having to do with fit and finish and our installers: * The Moxie demo for Dojo Offline used to take too long to load — it was loading about 27 resources on page load — we optimized this to about 3 resources on page load drastically improving page load time.* We created about 80% of a Windows installer using an open source toolkit from Microsoft called WiX. Unfortunately, WiXturns out to make easy things hard and hard things close to impossible, trying to turn XML into a programming language.

At SXSW and AjaxWorld, I had the opportunity to talk about dojo.gfx and native web vector graphics in general. The amazing thing about these talks was the large number of attendees familiar with and interested in SVG, Canvas, and other native vector graphics formats.

We’re almost there! Here’s a laundry list of some of the code checkins from the last week: * We now provide a way to give a ‘magic’ domain name that will resolve to the localhost to help in testing in scenarios where the developer is running both the client and the server on the same machine. Polipo, our local proxy, doesn’t read and parse your hosts.conf file for local domain names or use the platform’s standard gethostbyname function; instead, it rolls its own DNS communication for various reliability and performance reasons, which means that it bypasses the hosts.conf file.

Last week we did lots and lots of coding on the local proxy for Dojo Offline. Here’s a laundry list of some of the code checkins and QA fixes: * Moxie had an encoding bug related to new lines being incorrectly serialized during the Dojo Offline syncing process — fixed * Polipo, our local proxy, was modified so that if it is online and a network error occurs, either from DNS, talking to a server, etc., we automatically ‘fault’, move offline, and attempt to replay the request against our local cache.

Development was a bit slow last week since I was at Microsoft for a few days at their research laboraties and TechFest, and I gave a keynote at Yahoo on Thursday titled “Inventing the Future”. The video of the keynote should be available online this week.

Hello, Writing RPM packages seems to intimidate some, but it can be easier than you might guess. Below, I will: point out the online reference RPM documentation describe one method of configuring a build environment outline a simple specfile (sysreport package) describe the process of building the package from the specfile introduce a few convenient RPM macros Here are a few terms: specfile a file containing the rules for building an RPM package RPM the distributable package intended for the target SRPM a special package containing all the source code and the specfile for a given package rpm the command-line program used for installing packages rpmbuild the command-line program used for building packages The best place to get detailed documentation is the Maximum RPM Book, which is a bit old, but has documentation on most RPM building questions.

Someone managed to upload a document that broke Moxie — I’ve removed this document from the Moxie database and cleaned up most of the test docs people added to Moxie, leaving just a few. Go ahead and give Moxie + Dojo Offline a try if you haven’t before..

Sorry about getting this up a little late in the day; I’m actually in Redmond, Washington right now to attend a Microsoft research event at their R&D labs. I just got situated at my hotel and found a WiFi network to work from to start hacking on code and post this status report.