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. We’ve known Brad for a while through Dojo and his contributions to dojo.storage and dojo.flash, and highly respect his high quality work and his approach to tackling challenging problems. After Brad finished the HyperScope project, we started talking in greater detail with him in November about how to improve dojo.storage for offline usage. We quickly came to the conclusion that we had similar goals and interests, as well as a similar commitment to open source software, and agreed to collaborate on the development of Dojo Offline.

Through our funding of development efforts towards the Dojo Toolkit, Cometd, and now Dojo Offline, we realized that we could either spend a marketing budget on traditional advertising, or we could invest much of that towards contributing software to the community. Our decision to focus on giving back to the community was not a difficult choice!

So now, after working with Brad for almost four months, we’re excited to take Dojo Offline to the next level with the beta release:

  • We’re ready for help! In addition to needing extensive help testing it and shake out existing bugs (especially the cross-platform desktop side of things, which is rather new to us), we’re also actively looking for people interested in contributing to the effort. We don’t yet have a linux installer, and we’re not the best C developers in the world. See the “How You Can Help” section on the Dojo Offline Toolkit site.
  • We’re ready to help! Check out SitePen’s development and consulting services if you would like more information about how we can help you add offline capabilities to your web application.

We’ve had an incredible time working with Brad on the project, and we look forward to our ongoing relationship with Brad to continue improving Dojo Offline and expanding the possibilities of web applications. And we hope you enjoy Dojo Offline!