Last Thursday I was lucky enough to get over to the highly regarded web development conference ffconf in Brighton. This was my first time at the event and I can say that it lived up to and even exceeded my expectations.

Many modern web applications depend on JavaScript. When the complexity of your JavaScript increases, so does the maintenance cost.

Recently I was fortunate to be able to attend the Google Polymer Summit in Copenhagen with a SitePen colleague. Having attended the PWA Summit last year in Amsterdam we were expecting a well organised and interesting conference, and we were not to be disappointed.

For a concise read on why the enterprise should care about using TypeScript in its applications, look no further than Remo Jansen of the Aon Centre for Innovation and Analytics’ presentation on the 6 reasons you should be using TypeScript. The SitePen engineering team has been using TypeScript since it came onto the open source scene 5 years ago.

To quote professional zoologist Jim Fowler, “The biggest challenge is how to affect public attitudes and make people care.” When a small startup has a big idea, they run into an even bigger challenge. They want to change the public attitude towards charities and engage people on multiple levels, but it won’t happen unless they come up with a solution.

If you’re familiar with Dojo 1, you’re probably familiar with declare. Declare provides a flexible but controlled way to handle inheritance in JavaScript.

We’d like to introduce you to a gal who’s always bringing wit and interesting conversation to the table. She’s a rocking project manager and an expert at keeping our clients and team happy.

It’s been over a year since the release of dgrid 0.4, which brought about some major changes, including integration with the new dstore API. Since then, we (and others) have used it in numerous applications, and we’ve continued to refine it.

I had the opportunity to speak and attend FullStack 2015 organised by Skills Matter and hosted at their CodeNode location in central London. It was a great experience and it’s clear that JavaScript is everywhere and permeating every aspect of technology today! It was no surprise that ES6/ES2015 and TypeScript were popping up in every conversation.

The one thing I would have you know about Ed is that he’s a real-life renaissance man. When Ed’s not skydiving, full-stack engineering, being an amazing father, devoted husband, raising chickens, snowboarding, making tomato sauce or being a mentor, Ed can be found moving all of his worldly possessions back and forth between the states of Kansas and Washington.

The V8 team (the JavaScript engine that powers Chrome, Opera, Node.js, MongoDB, etc…) are moving forward with an experiment in defining a stronger version of JavaScript that ensures that code being run is behaving well, and introducing run-time typing based on TypeScript’s typings. V8’s motivation is always performance, and a more stringent set of ECMAScript would obviously allow them to tune the engine to streamline performance, but are there other benefits? Update: Status of the V8 strong mode experiment.

Transpiling or compiling code has become a necessity today for JavaScript-based web development. Whether you are using TypeScript, Babel, Dart, Traceur, or CoffeeScript to provide additional language features, or trying to optimise your code with the likes of UglifyJS, r.js, or Closure Compiler, once you have modified your source code, you start to run into challenges.

In line with SitePen’s continued growth, we’re excited to announce that Kitson Kelly has joined the SitePen team as our new Chief Technology Officer. Kitson, who usually goes by just Kit, brings a wealth of technical knowledge and engineering leadership, as well as some interesting British humour to the table.

Deadlines are looming and it looks like it’s is going to come down to the wire. A developer has hit a roadblock while trying to integrate code from another team and connect it to a third-party API.

At the end of 2014, we looked ahead to determine where to focus SitePen’s open source efforts in the coming year. After our successful contributions to dgrid and the new dstore package, it became increasingly clear that contributing to the future of Dojo was where our team would have the biggest impact and the most fun.

Good news everyone! Now that summer is over, there’s no more heat to complain about! That just leaves, ah yes, the bitter cold. Sure, maybe you’ve been handling it well enough so far by staying busy with holiday planning, but what happens when the New Year comes? Suddenly nobody is “Dreaming of a white…” anything, anymore.

What a great year 2013 has been! We’re feeling (collectively) like Ebenezer Scrooge in the final chapters of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – except we haven’t been jerks up ’til now and we think working at SitePen is a year-round Christmas vacation, unlike the earlier chapters wherein Scrooge forces poor Mr. Cratchit to work by the heat of a candle.

A common error when using Dijits is “Tried to register widget with id==XXX but that id is already registered”. That is the dijit/registry telling us that we’ve made a mistake instantiating a widget.

Dijit widgets provide the ability to write custom setters and getters, whose logic is executed when calling the set and get methods. dijit/_WidgetBase also provides a _set method, which is very important when writing widgets, but can cause a bit of confusion due to its name.

A concept that is often confusing to new JavaScript developers is the idea of function context, specifically as it relates to the value of this. For example, methods in Java are bound to classes at compile time, and this in a method call will always refer to an instance of the method’s class.

One pretty common issue we get in the dojo-interest mailing list asks why RoundRectStoreList.set(“store”, store); doesn’t actually appear to be setting the store properly? That is, the data in the RoundRectStoreList doesn’t actually render the data in the new store, but instead keeps old data rendered. An example of this error: HTML: [code language=”html”] Swap ‘Em! [/code] JavaScript: [code language=”javascript”] require([ “dojo/store/Memory”, “dijit/form/Button”, “dojox/mobile/RoundRectStoreList” ], function (Memory, Button, RoundRectStoreList) { var sampleStore1 = new Memory({data:[ { “label”: “Wi-Fi”, “rightText”: “Off”, “moveTo”: “bar” }, { “label”: “VPN”, “rightText”: “VPN”, “moveTo”: “bar” } ], idProperty:”label”}), sampleStore2 = new Memory({data:[ { “label”: “Ice Cream”, “rightText”: “Ice Cream”, “moveTo”: “bar” }, { “label”: “Shortcake”, “rightText”: “Shortcake”, “moveTo”: “bar” } ], idProperty:”label”}), storeList = new RoundRectStoreList({store:sampleStore1}, “storeList”), wrongSwap = new Button({}, “wrongSwap”), isStore1 = true; storeList.startup(); wrongSwap.on(“click”, function () { storeList.set(“store”, isStore1 ? sampleStore2 : sampleStore1); isStore1 = !isStore1; }); }); [/code] Here, you will see that the data in the list never actually changes, even though we’re attempting to set the store using the .set() function.

As dgrid’s adoption continues to rise, one of the most common questions developers ask is how to add filtering controls. Unlike some grid implementations, dgrid does not include an out-of-the-box component implementing a user interface for filtering.

Want to learn Dojo in 2013?  Great! We want to teach you and coincidentally we have just completed a total revamp of our entire line of Dojo Workshops! Sign up today and get Dojo 101 for FREE Since this is the season for giving, we've decided to do just that!  We are giving away our Dojo 101: Fundamentals workshop ($649 value) for FREE when you sign up for Dojo 201: Interfaces or Dojo 202: Architecture. Just register before December 31, 2012 and enter promo code FREE101! Exciting New Dojo Workshops! We have rewritten, revamped and reinvigorated all of our Dojo workshops!   These are exciting adventures into best practices of Dojo 1.8 with more hands-on coding and activities than ever before! Buh-bye static Keynote slides Developed using Dojo 1.8, we have created a new web-based presentation system that uses WebSockets to keep all student viewers in sync with our trainer during the course.

Debugging JavaScript can be a tedious and frustrating chore. To compound the already difficult task of debugging, browser vendors each have their own style of error messaging, some of which are confusing, cryptic, or downright misleading to the untrained eye.

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.

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.

After many months of work, Dojo 1.8 Beta is almost here. We expect beta to be ready for use on June 22, 2012, with the final 1.8 release due 4-6 weeks later! We’re very excited about this release for many reasons.

“Small businesses embody the spirit of innovation and they are the lifeblood of our economy,” says David Chavern, U.S. Chamber executive vice president and chief operating officer.

Dylan wrapped up his 2012 Dojo tour last week, presenting twice at IBM Impact 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada. If you attended IBM Impact 2012 and missed Dylan’s talks, or didn’t attend IBM Impact and want to see what was presented we’ve posted the slides of the talks: Star Search: Dojo 2 and HTML 5 Beyond Dojo: The Rise of Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD) – with James Thomas A big thank you to IBM for having us speak at Impact 2012 and to James Thomas for sharing the stage on the Beyond Dojo talk.

Over the last few weeks, Dylan has given talks across the western United States and Europe and we’ve tracked his every move on our blog. Dylan will finish his trip with stops in Tempe, AZ and Las Vegas, Nevada.

Continuing on his road trip, Dylan presented AMD in Depth at the London Ajax User Group meeting on April 10th.   Over 80 optimistic and energetic developers attended the engaging presentation. Want to learn more about AMD?  Check out the presentation on our SlideShare page.

Dylan travelled to IUT, a modern technical university in Béziers, France, to present the keynote talk at Web-5.  Over 70 people attended his AMD and stores presentation.   The audience was highly engaged, asking a wide range of questions and Dylan was honored to have been shown brief demos of apps that were re-written using Dojo! Next event stop for Dylan is London, England on April 10th for the London Ajax User Group.  With James Thomas, Dylan will present a pair of talks on AMD. Be sure to follow SitePen on your favorite social network!.

The 2012 ESRI Developer Summit is attended by 1,700 developers, half are attending for the first time and thirty percent are from international locations! Dylan continues to mingle with like-minded Dojo enthusiasts from around the world, including people from the US, Canada, UAE, Japan, England, Germany, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands!  The conversations at ESRI Dev Summit are confirming what we already know – Dojo is worldwide! Yesterday, Dylan presented Top Ways Dojo Can Improve Your Mapping App to a standing room only crowd!  Using an iPad, iPhone and MacBook Pro to present the talk and demo, Dylan was able to accurately showcase the cross-platform open web capabilities of Dojo.   We’ve posted the presentation and encourage you to take a look. SitePen will answer any questions you have about Dojo and mapping.  Contact us to learn more.

Dylan arrived in Palm Springs on Saturday with hundreds of other ESRI Partners just in time to participate in the Jim Christoffersen Golf Classic.  The four-player shamble event took place on the south course at the Indian Canyons Golf Resort.  Dylan had the honor of golfing with the founder of ESRI Japan, Chiharu Masaki, and meeting many ESRI partners from around the world.  The five hour event was enjoyed in the almost perfect Palm Springs weather, and Dylan reports that his golf game “wasn’t that bad”.

Dylan has a full schedule of events from March to May!  We are excited about the awesome opportunities we will have over the next couple of months to support our clients, teach more Dojo, and, hopefully, meet you! If you will be attending any of the events listed, and want to chat with Dylan while you’re there, send us a message.  We will do everything we can to make your meeting happen. SitePen is proud to be a Platinum Sponsor for this event.  In addition to supporting ESRI through our sponsorship, Dylan will be delivering a conference presentation and teaching a 1-day Dojo Workshop! It is a busy schedule, but don’t worry, Dylan will also be golfing while he’s there.

We hear it a lot. You want to learn Dojo, especially now that Dojo 1.7 is released, but you don’t know how to ask your boss.

Hot on the heels of the Dojo 1.7.1 release, we are excited to officially publish SitePen’s 1.7-specific updates to not one, not two but ALL 55 Dojo 1.6 tutorials. As you can guess, this was no small feat given that Dojo 1.7 is loaded with significant changes that encompass best practices on the road to 2.0.

Most 2012 trend lists include 12 trends. (Get it?  12 in ’12.  Of course you do.).

Welcome to 2012 – The Year of Dojo!  We are expecting an amazing year! Make SitePen your one stop shop for all of your web application needs: Dojo workshops, JavaScript support and web app development.  Together, with SitePen, you will meet your 2012 goals!  When you’re happy, so are we.

If you’ve been reading about Dojo 1.7, the first thing you’re probably wondering is, what is this AMD thing that everyone is talking about? Check out Dylan’s post at the Dojo Toolkit blog to “Learn more about AMD!”. In addition to the useful links Dylan provides, you can also learn more about AMD at a SitePen Dojo Workshop.

SitePen is so dedicated to providing you with the highest quality Dojo Toolkit education in the industry that we will be in 11 states, providing 22 Dojo Workshops throughout 2012.  Whether you want to learn the basics of Dojo or sharpen your Dojo skills, we have a workshop just for you.

SitePen’s Dylan Schiemann delivered the last of his three Rich Web Experience 2011 presentations yesterday, Never Bet Against the Open Web. Dylan had this to say about his time at #RWX2011: The level of interest in AMD, object stores, and mobile is impressive.

SitePen’s Dylan Schiemann delivered a powerful keynote, Real Time, Real Fast, during the opening ceremony of Rich Web Experience 2011 last night in Fort Lauderdale, FL.  His presentation covered the evolution of web app development through modern real time technologies, cost and benefits of different transports, provided a deep dive into WebSocket, and advocated for using a scalable architecture with constant time and space event distribution.  In case you missed it, you can view his presentation here.  (We think it was pretty awesome.) Today, Dylan will present Dojo 2.0: Modular, Mobile, and Reinventing Web App Development covering the reinvention of the Dojo Toolkit, one of the original Ajax toolkits, showing off the wide variety of features and approaches currently available in Dojo and give a sneak peak of the forthcoming Dojo 2.0 release.  This is one presentation you won’t want to miss! For those of you not attending Rich Web Experience 2011, or if you were so amazed that you want to see his presentations again, we will be making all of Dylan’s Rich Web Experience 2011 presentations available online shortly after the conference.  To be one of the first to know when they are available, get social with SitePen.   Follow us on SlideShare | Twitter | Google+.. .

SitePen’s CEO, and co-founder of the Dojo Toolkit, Dylan Schiemann will be kicking off Rich Web Experience 2011 with an engaging Real Time, Real Fast keynote address.  His talk will cover WebSocket, one of the hottest new APIs in HTML5, which enables true duplex communication without the overhead, complexity, and extraneous latency of HTTP-based solutions.  His keynote will also cover the use of streaming abstractions to minimize buffering, and will consider the performance implications of topic-based publish-subscribe distribution versus filtering techniques. On Wednesday, November 30, Dylan will present Dojo 2.0: Modular, Mobile, and Reinventing Web App Development.  This presentation will cover the reinvention of the Dojo Toolkit, one of the original Ajax toolkits.  Through a series of improvements in modularity, performance, API improvements, adjustments for HTML5 and mobile platforms, the Dojo Toolkit will continue to provide a stellar platform for building web apps.  Dylan will show off the wide variety of features and approaches currently available in Dojo, and give a sneak peak of the forthcoming Dojo 2.0 release.

Featured as one of three sessions to see on Monday’s web track at the BlackBerry DevCon Americas conference in San Francisco this week, SitePen’s CEO Dylan Schiemann presented Make Beautiful Apps Faster Using the Dojo Mobile Toolkit.  His session talked about creating superior experiences using standard open web technologies and presented an overview of the Dojo Toolkit, HTML5 and mobile-specific features and new Dojo APIs that fundamentally change web application development for the better.

Do you want to learn in depth details to create web applications with Dojo and Dijit? Join us in Seattle on November 16th for our 2-day Dojo Skills workshop. Dojo Skills emphasizes some of the unique advantages Dojo offers in cross-browser charts and user interface widgets through a powerful development model.

SitePen was in full effect at DojoConf 2011.  Not only did we lead up to the conference with our amazing tutorials, we also impressed with our intense knowledge of all things Dojo.  In case you missed it, or if you just want to see them again, here are our presentations. Dojo Conf 2011 Keynote- Dylan Schiemann dgrid: Next Generation Dojo Grid- Kris Zyp The Power of Promises- Brian Arnold Better late than never?  We think so..

Join us for our introductory jUMP into Dojo (1 day) or our Dojo Skills (2 days) workshop – or both!- on November 1 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Oh, and when you register by October 14th, you will receive a FREE SitePen Mini-Boost Support plan – a $300 value! jUMP into Dojo is the best starting point for any developer wanting to learn about Dojo, Ajax and Rich Internet Application development.  Attendees will receive a rapid introduction to the capabilities of Dojo as well as the experience in applying them to solve real-world problems.

We’re 28 days away and as promised we’re releasing a tutorial everyday until DojoConf 2011! Here’s today’s tutorial! Dojo Data is the legacy data interface used to abstract data consumers (like widgets) from the concerns of data providers. While the new object store interface has superseded the dojo.data interface, there are a number of existing data stores that implement this API and is used by quite a few existing widgets.

We just happen to have another reason to be in Chicago next week! We had a blast with the folks at Vodori last time so, we’ll buy the next round! Join us for a beer on July 27, 2011! REGISTER TODAY!. .

Next in our series of Dojo Tutorials, we have the first of three tutorials on the DataGrid! The DataGrid is the central component of many applications due to its effective and usable presentation of tabular data. In this tutorial we will look at how to define a grid’s layout and discuss the scrolling mechanism the DataGrid uses.

More dates!! Cheaper options!! More locations! Beer! WE HEAR YOU! Join us for any number of workshops across the US and rest assured, you’ll get a brain-load of code and we’ll even throw in a pizza and a (dojo.)beer!! View Public Workshop Schedule. .

Join us for foo, folks and fun! We just wanted to throw out a quick invite, to all the Silicon Valley-based JavaScripters out there, to join a couple of our boys for a couple of drinks! Meet us, meet Dojo, meet the bartender — whatever your angle — Let us know you’re coming!. .

Communication. Lead.

Next in our ongoing series of Dojo mobile tutorials, we create the Settings View of our TweetView app. In the previous post, Getting Started with TweetView: Tweets and Mentions, we solidified our mobile application’s file structure, reviewed TweetView’s goals, and created the Tweets and Mentions views by coding tweetview._ViewMixin andtweetview.TweetView.

Next in our ongoing series of Dojo tutorials, learn what’s available Beyond Dojo’s Core. One of the things that differentiates Dojo from many other JavaScript libraries is its scope.

Our series of Dojo tutorials continues with Deferreds and Promises. Deferreds are a wonderful and powerful thing, but they’re really an implementation of something greater – a promise.

You called and sent postcards, you emailed, you blogged, you petitioned outside of Trader Joe’s, ran ads on public access and someone even sent a fax — MESSAGE RECEIVED! We’ll hold a public workshop (or two). So get ready to be showered with insane amounts of information and code, opportunities to meet some cool people (and us!), hang out with other Dojo devs, and perhaps even attend a dojo.beer event! Sound good? Read all about it!.

There’s really no obvious “winner” in the Apple vs. Adobe spat.

Persevere 1.0 is now available for download. Persevere is a JavaScript storage and application server that uses a standards-based interface of HTTP/REST, JSON-RPC, JSONPath, and REST Channels.

The Dojo-based Bespin project has added collaboration and social features so developers can more easily share code in real-time! Finally, a truly productive use of social networking for developers! By combining the benefits of SubEthaEdit and many of the social features you find on networking sites, the project is headed in a very useful direction that should significantly improve the way software is developed. Bespin has huge potential for open source projects…

As part of our series on how we built Queued, today we’re going to talk about theming the Queued application, and touch on a few examples of what made putting the skin on Queued so much fun. The foundation for the beautiful theme for Queued was laid down by colleagues Damon Dimmick and Torrey Rice, and their amazing wireframe and mockup work (respectively) provided the building blocks for laying down Queued’s skin.

Last month, we announced Queued, an open-source application for managing your Netflix Queue. Queued is a desktop application created with web technologies and techniques including the Dojo Toolkit, and it is distributed as an Adobe AIR application to provide several performance boosting benefits from living on the desktop.

SitePen and uxebu are pleased to announce their first joint Dojo workshop in Munich, Germany. Come join some of the co-creators of Dojo on the 7th and 8th of May, 2009 to learn how to build great web sites and applications with Dojo.

I’m excited to announce a new open source project created by SitePen and co-sponsored by Adobe: Queued. With Queued, you can manage your Netflix queue anytime, anywhere! It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Dojo here.

As 2008 wraps up, there are a number of announcements and noteworthy items surrounding Dojo, DWR, Persevere, and SitePen services. Dojo was recently updated to version 1.2.3.

Is it time to bring your team up to speed with Ajax, Open Source, and the real technologies of the web? Or perhaps you want to increase your marketability in a tough economy. Or maybe you’re looking to allocate a small portion of your company budget to continuing education.

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

NOTE: This post is out of date.Read our updated version of this post for more up to date information! Everyone who owns an iPhone (or who has been holding out for an iPhone 3G) is bound to be excited about a lot of the new things the device can finally do, particularly the introduction of third-party applications. But those of us in the web development community have been itching for something further still: good web applications on the iPhone.

In the middle of May, we were given a mission: create a speedy, offline API documentation viewer and a graphical Dojo build tool. Here we are at the beginning of July, and the result is the Dojo Toolbox 1.0.

MAMP is an easy way to get a basic MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment running. Each package in the stack is configured such that it’s easy to drop the MAMP directory into /Applications and serve up a database-backed PHP site.

This is the final part of our three part series on porting Dojo methods to Flash. In part one of our series, we implemented Dojo’s hitch method, and then used hitch in part two, where we made our connect method.

Adobe recently announced their new Open Screen project, which opens the licensing of the Flash Player and much more. We’re celebrating this event with a three part series on Dojo and ActionScript and previewing some of the work by the Dojo team.

There’s been some breaking news from Adobe, announcing their Open Screen project. As of today, they are opening the licensing of the Flash Player, FLV/F4V video, publishing the AMF protocol and device APIs for the player, and more.

At SitePen, we’re dedicated to creating excellent user experiences and writing clean, beautiful code. Because of this, we’ve earned a reputation as being advocates, advisers and teachers to our friends, colleagues, and clients.

Much like a magpie, I find myself oddly infatuated with shiny things. When a UI component somewhere just screams elegance, I find myself compelled to use it.

Since Dojo 1.1 was released a week ago, several outlets have published articles: Dojo 1.1 Refines Ajax Development – Features SitePen’s Peter Higgins and Alex Russell with their thoughts on Dojo 1.1, and a comprehensive summary of what’s new with the 1.1 release Dojo Stabilizes Open Source Ajax Toolkit – Mentions Dojo backing from IBM, Sun, AOL and Nexaweb, and gives a summary of IBM and Nexaweb’s opinions of Dojo 1.1 Dojo Encourages Ajax Innovation – The facts aren’t particularly solid in this one, but it’s still nice to see Dojo get mentioned Adobe AIR for Linux – Mentions Dojo working on AIR What’s new with Google Gears – Includes a short section about Dojo Storage and the Gears Dojo data provider. .

As programming languages go, Python is hot. It was TIOBE’s language of the year in 2007 because of its fast growth.

We recently added JSONPath support to the Dojo Toolkit. In the Dojo Toolkit 1.1, JSONPath queries can now be executed by calling dojox.jsonPath.query.

We’re very excited about our new commercial support offering for the Dojo Toolkit, DWR, and Cometd. So what is SitePen Support and what do we have to offer? When getting started with something different or new, there’s rarely documentation or a tutorial that addresses things in quite the right way.

It’s not very often that I get to work on some software that has the potential to appeal to developers, testers, designers, and the marketing team all at once. And of course when I do get to work on something like that, it usually means there is a significant amount of pressure to get it done and done quickly.

Joe was recently interviewed by InfoQ about DWR 3.0 as a preview of his presentation on Comet and DWR at QCon. Key points about DWR 3.0 include: Offline Support (Google Gears and/or Dojo Offline) TIBCO General Interface integration Aptana Jaxer integration OpenAjax Hub, PubSub, Bayeux, etc.

Over the past few years designing and developing I’ve come to rely on a number of tools. Most of these are obvious like Photoshop and Firebug, however I’ve come to realize that a few tools I use aren’t as well known.

Mobile application development has many challenges. The announcement of Google Gears on Mobile Devices will help solve the problems of network connectivity, network latency, and limited bandwidth.

SitePen was in the news recently: Simplexity Rising: Web usability reveals itself to be a game of hide-and-seek covers our session, “Your Mom, 2.0”, for the upcoming SXSW 2008, and offers some choice quotes about building web apps that are feature rich yet easy to use. At this session, we’ll be discussing the things that make an app that’s easy for Mom to use but still delivers the features everyone wants to use.

From a recent interview with Kevin Hakman on Ajaxian: “I personally love the ability to write a script that runs on the server, but call it from the client as if it were running on the client. In this case Jaxer handles all the sync or async communications for you transparently, and soon will provide end-to-end debug capabilities as well.

While the media has beat us to the punch with countless “on AIR” puns (and the list of companies using the word air grows), we completed work to make the Dojo Toolkit compatible with Adobe AIR in time for its recent launch. It’s a platform for web app deployment that’s somewhat similar to a browser: web applications are deployed to the desktop using AIR, giving web applications some of the capabilities of desktop apps while retaining the ability to use web app development tools like the Dojo Toolkit.

I’ve just had a whirlwind trip to Stockholm for JFokus 2008. It was a focused conference with some really interesting presentations.

With the release of the iPhone 1.1.3 firmware update, Apple has given us the ability to create custom “webclip” icons (think “favicon” for your iPhone and iPod Touch) by adding a special file called “apple-touch-icon.png” to the root of your website (same place as the favicon). As an example, to the left is the new icon for SitePen.

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.

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 recently had the opportunity to speak about Dojo on the iPhone at AjaxWorld West. The session was a straightforward, if not colorful, review of the current state of app development for the iPhone.

With the recent launch of Dojo 0.9 and the planned launch of 1.0 in late October, the SitePen Dojo training courses have been revamped and now focus exclusively on the new code base. SitePen’s partnership with UK-based Skills Matter is allowing us to offer our 3-day Dojo training workshop overseas, several times, in the upcoming months.

Slides from our recent talks at the Ajax Experience and the Rich Web Experience are now available. Newly added talks include: Standards Heresy: Dojo and the Rise of Open Web Pragmatism Dojo 0.9: Faster, Leaner, and Dijit? Comet: Low Latency Data Transit or Really Bad Pun?.