The latest and greatest release of the Dojo Ajax Toolkit has just hit the presses, and she’s looking good. As Alex mentioned, the number of cool features in Dojo can be difficult to keep up with, so I’ll just list some of the things I’ve either written for Dojo, helped along, or just been damn impressed by in this release:
Dojo Datastores
The number of useful data stores for Dojo just keeps growing and growing, under the watchful eye of Jared. For release 1.1, I submitted a data store to read Atom XML documents, dojox.data.AtomReadStore. See more about this at https://shaneosullivan.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/new-atom-data-store-for-dojo/.
FisheyeLite
Peter Higgins submitted an amazingly simple, but oh-so-cool widget called dojox.widget.FisheyeLite. Rather than act like a ‘true’ Fisheye widget, which would generally only work on images (Ć” la OS X), this widget can apply cool Fisheye-like behaviors to just about anything – text, divs, spans, you name it. Check out the test page for some cool examples, or see my personal website for an example of how I used it to spruce up my site menu.
Django Template Languate – dojox.dtl
The Django Template Language is an amazingly powerful templating language, with which you can turn your JavaScript data into HTML. While this was originally designed to be a server side templating solution, Neil Roberts has done a brilliant job of converting it over to work in the browser. While I though I’d had an original idea when I pitched the idea to him that it’d be cool to integrate Dojo data stores directly into DTL, Alex already had the whole thing implemented and about to check it in. Typical š I’ve written up a tutorial on how to integrate DTL with Dojo data stores, specifically the AtomReadStore I wrote, at https://shaneosullivan.wordpress.com/2008/03/03/writing-a-django-template-widget-with-dojo-data-stores/.
Functional Programming
This enables you perform many operations on data using just a single function call. Once of the cool things it provides is the ability to specify a function as a simple string, drastically reducing the complexity and size of your own code. Eugene Lazutkin wrote a great blog post about this, which is well worth a read. I wrote a follow up post, as a quick reference to some of the cool things you can do with this feature. Some of this was available in 1.0, but I’ve just discovered it, so here you go!
Dojo Campus
Peter Higgins, Nikolai Onken and myself have been working on a new learning resource for Dojo developers, called Dojo Campus. It provides a lot of learning materials, including videos, tutorials for beginners and more advanced programmers, and much more. We also have a still-under-wraps-but-soon-to-be-release demo engine that has loads of easy to use runtime examples of things to make and do with Dojo. I blogged about a very early version of it at https://shaneosullivan.wordpress.com/2008/01/07/dojo-demo-engine-update/, but it’s come a long way since then. Keep you eyes peeled for it’s release. Any day now…..
And finally….
A very sexy Calendar widget I’ve written got submitted just a bit too late to make in into 1.1 (read: the day before release), but will be in the nightlies soon, and will make it into 1.2. See the blog post about it at https://shaneosullivan.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/sexy-new-calendar-widget-for-dojo/.
This is nowhere near a comprehensive list of course, just the bits I’ve been fiddling with over the last few months:
- See Dylan’s post for some more info.
- Get the release notes here.
- See the Ajaxian post here.
- See Alex Russell’s (Dojo project lead) post here.
So go forth and explore, it’s good healthy nerd-fun! Share this post:
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