Cool Portlets in Dojo

I’ve been working on writing Portlets for the Dojo Ajax Toolkit for a while now, and they’re almost ready.

You can see a demo of it at http://www.skynet.ie/~sos/misc/dojo/dojox/widget/tests/test_PortletInGridContainer.html?theme=soria

A Portlet is similar to a dijit.TitlePane, in that it has a title bar, a content area, and is collapsible.  However, it should also have the option of being configurable, perhaps using a dialog box or an expandable area.  A nice example is the BBC website at http://bbc.co.uk, or the Google Portal http://www.google.com/ig.

Portlets are generally presented in a draggable grid, and a very cool new addition to Dojo is the dojox.layout.GridContainer, which provides this framework.

A number of types of Portlets and Setting widgets will be provided, hopefully in v1.4 (1.3 is in final beta, so this is too late for that).

• dojox.widget.Portlet – this is the basic Portlet, which provides a close button, a collapse button, and a settings button.  All of these are optional.
• dojox.widget.FeedPortlet – this Portlet loads an external Atom or RSS feed and displays it as a list.  Hovering over an item shows a dijit.Tooltip with a summary of the news story.
• dojox.widget.ExpandableFeedPortlet – similar to FeedPortlet, but instead of using tooltips, a toggle icon is used to show more or less of a news story.
• dojox.widget.PortletSettings – a widget that can be placed inside a Portlet to provide customizable settings for that widget.
• dojox.widget.PortletDialogSettings – like PortletSettings, but the configuration options are displayed in a dijit.Dialog.
• dojox.widget.PortletFeedSettings – provides one or more URLs to Atom or RSS feeds for a FeedPortlet to load.

These widgets offer pretty large set of functionality, which should be sufficient for the majority of peoples needs.  However, this is still in active development, and if you have any ideas for cool additions or changes I could make, please let me know.

Dojo 1.1 is cooked and ready to eat!

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 http://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 (á 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 I’ve written up a tutorial on how to integrate DTL with Dojo data stores, specifically the AtomReadStore I wrote, at http://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 http://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 http://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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Sexy new Calendar widget for Dojo

I’ve submitted a sexy new Calendar widget to the Dojo Toolkit, called dojox.widget.Calendar. Check out a test page for it at http://www.skynet.ie/~sos/js/demo/dojo/dojox/widget/tests/test_Calendar.html. The ticket tracking it is at http://trac.dojotoolkit.org/ticket/6297.

The features of this calendar widget are:

• Day view – the standard view, showing all the days in a month
• Month view – lists the twelve months of the year.
• Year view – lists all the years that can be chosen.
• Cool animations between these views.
• Cool animations when moving from month to month, and from year to year.
• Cool animations when moving the mouse over the widget, courtesy of the dojox.widget.FisheyeLite widget. (tired of cool animations yet? Nah, me neither)

The daily, monthly and yearly views of the Calendar

I was inspired to write it after seeing the very cool Calendar widget in the AjaxControl Toolkit, a .NET Ajax framework, which made me think “I wonder how long this would take to write with Dojo?“, taking into account the obvious: not a single line of code could be copied from the original.

The answer turned out to be about 3 hours or so, since Dojo already provided the majority of what I needed.

• All the Date-related heavy lifting is done with dijit._Calendar, the existing Dojo calendar widget. This also handles the majority of the localisation issues.
• Most of the animations are done using the dojo.animateProperty function.
• Generating the HTML of the widget is mostly taken care of by the standard Dijit templating system.

What remained to do was changing the exiting dijit._Calendar HTML template to give a month and year view, and fiddling with CSS to get it looking right. A textbox popup widget was also submitted to integrate the Calendar with a text input field, called dojox.form.DateTextBox;

Hopefully this will make it’s way into the DojoX project fairly soon, and be available for general use.
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