As 2008 wraps up, there are a number of announcements and noteworthy items surrounding Dojo, DWR, Persevere, and SitePen services.
Dojo News
Dojo was recently updated to version 1.2.3. Version 1.3, originally slated for this month with support for IE 8, has been postponed until January or February due to delays for the release of IE 8. Significant improvements to the quality and presentation of Dojo’s documentation are also nearing completion.
A few interesting Dojo articles were recently published including the Opera Dojo Tutorial by SitePen’s Peter Higgins. Dojo contributor Ben Hockey also created a great list of the 10 things you should know about Dojo.
Dojo co-creator Alex Russell announced Census 2, a project to more accurately compare performance between Ajax and Flex apps.
The DojoX Grid that was new to Dojo 1.2 is an extremely popular Dojo feature. Dojo contributor Peter Svensson just released a book, Learning Dojo, that is the first of its kind to effectively introduce the usage of the dojo grid.
Sizzle, John Resig’s new CSS Selector engine for JavaScript toolkits, has been accepted as a Dojo Foundation project. Initial efforts are underway to integrate Sizzle into Dojo. More importantly, this initiative shows a strong desire between popular toolkits to not reinvent the wheel on commodity features and to collaborate in an open and non-IP encumbered manner.
For developers just getting started with Dojo, SitePen is offering its first online Dojo training course for $499 at the end of January.
DWR and Persevere Releases Coming Soon
DWR 3.0 Release Candidate 1 was announced at the beginning of December, with a final release expected in early January.
Persevere is approaching a 1.0 release for February or March 2009. The new Persevere JSON Database Explorer shows Persevere in action using the DojoX Grid.
SitePen offers training, support, and development services for Dojo, DWR, Cometd, and Persevere. Contact us for more details or an initial consultation.