Jan 032008
 

First of all, Happy New Year. I hope 2008 will bring you good fortune.

Here at SNAPPS I’ve been extremely busy preparing for my sessions at Lotusphere. I’ve already posted about them here. If you have a chance to attend Lotusphere this year, and are using Domino, I think this will be the most exciting one in years. If you see me in the halls, come up and introduce yourself. I love meeting new people.

December ended very hectic with my youngest son Erik’s first birthday and later Christmas with in-laws visiting. A great time with family and lots of great food.

I know a lot of you are waiting for my update of the Dojo Calendar to work with the Dojo Toolkit 1.0 and beyond. I’m working hard to have it out there for you soon. I’ve been very busy with “real” work, but I have a working copy so all I can say is soon.

Speaking of the Dojo Calendar. I have decided to make it work with dojo.data. To make the calendar get information from many different resources is important and the Dojo data stores make that more convenient using the same API no matter what the source is.

I hope I see you at Lotusphere.

Nov 052007
 

The Dojo Toolkit 1.0 was released this morning. Many of us, including me, has waited patiently for this release. Now I can finalize the updated code for Dojo Calendar.

There are many new, improved and awesome features.

New and Awesome:

  • The Grid. This is the feature everyone’s been waiting for, and now it’s here! With support for virtual scrolling to accommodate huge data sets efficiently, built-in sorting and column resize to help you find what you’re looking for, complex formatting, and fixed rows and column headers, the new Grid lets you slice-and-dice your data as never
    before. The 1.0 grid features a Tundra theme, editing and write-back examples, support for custom cell editors (including the full set of accessible and localized Dijit editing components), and markup-driven instantiation.
  • Charting returns! The new dojox.charting supports automatic axis calculations, widget-driven instantiation, multiple chart types, dojo.data data sources, and theming. Good-looking, data-oriented default themes help make your data understandable and easy on the eyes at the same time. And since dojox.charting is based on dojox.gfx, the general-purpose 2D drawing layer in Dojo, charting will only get more powerful, responsive, and good looking over time.
  • a11y and i18n: rich experiences for everyone. All Dijit 1.0 widgets feature keyboard navigation, right-to-left text detection and layout, and solid localizations for 12 languages. No matter where in the world you are, Dijit has you covered. Dijit goes even further by providing ARIA role and state hinting to give users of assistive technologies the experience that developers intend.
  • Universal data access. dojo.data and the growing list of data store implementations makes building and using data-driven widgets simpler and faster.
  • dojox.gfx3d. Beautiful, portable 2D drawing is what dojox.gfx has always been about, and we’re taking it further with the ability to draw 3D scenes. 3D charting is based on gfx3d. This module was developed as a Summer of Code project by Kun Xi.
  • improved widget look-and-feel. The base Tundra theme continues to be improved. New and exciting extension (dojox) widgets are appearing in 1.0, including a new Lightbox widget.
  • Django templating for widgets. Many people have fallen in love with Django’s templating syntax and now you can now use it to build widgets thanks to Neil Roberts’ excellent dojox.dtl package.
  • improved stability, speed, and compatibility across the board.

Improved:

  • Dijit form widgets obey width in a way that makes visual sense
  • reworked validation indicators for form elements
  • lightbox widget
  • the widget lifecycle has been improved such that create() is now called from postfix(), allowing your constructor code to “get in on the ground floor”
  • the new Drupal front-end for the Neil’s documentation parser is now checked into the util namespace. This version provides disambiguated summaries and detail pages of the parsed object hierarchy, and since these pages are in Drupal, comments can be left by anyone.
  • better command-line functioning of the unit test system
  • an improved Firebug Lite which allows inspection of errors, popup-window placement, and parent-child cross frame logging.
  • smoother animations
  • build system now handles UTF-8 correctly end-to-end
  • improved documentation and unit test coverage for all Core and Dijit APIs/widgets

Congratulations to the Dojo team for this milestone. I know it’s been a lot of hard work.

May 172007
 

I have put the update of my Dojo Calendar on hold for a while. First I am extremely busy with work here at SNAPPS creating templates for the upcoming release of Lotus Quickr, secondly I’m upgrading all my code to fit better in the upcoming 0.9 release of the Dojo Toolkit.

I’m also looking into integrating with Google Calendar using their API. With PHP you can use the Zend Framework to do that. The next step is to port all my current PHP code over to Java Server Pages (JSP).

I’m very excited that over 200 has downloaded the code from the original post, so there must be some interest out there.

I have a few questions for you the reader.

  • What are your plans to use Dojo Calendar for?
  • What database will you use to store your calendar entries?
  • If you are one of the over 200 that has uploaded the original code. Have you done or are planning any modifications to the code?