Dylan Schiemann

JavaScript appeared in Thursday’s Dilbert… so bizarre.

I noticed the recent post on drupal.org that Scripteka, a predominantly prototype-focused site, is based on Drupal. It’s of course worth mentioning that the Dojo Toolkit uses Drupal for its web site as well, and later this year, the other Dojo Foundation project sites will likely start using Drupal as well. Not that Drupal is the easiest platform to work with, but it offers a lot of great community features making it as close to ideal as we could find for Dojo.

After years of loving Linkin Park’s music, in part because I love their sound, and in part because they had a good local following when I lived in Santa Monica, I’m saddened to learn that yes, all Linkin Park songs do sound the same. Yes Dylan, you do like listening to the same thing over and over again. As much as I enjoy Radiohead and the other 1000 interesting bands, I still listen to Linkin Park repeatedly. At least they don’t sound like Nickelback Levine, which I’ve been making fun of for quite some time.

And yet, I’ll still be listening to Linkin Park, because it has the sound that Dylan’s need (end Idiocracy reference).

We’re starting to offer Dojo 1.0 training courses, with completely revamped course materials, activities, and more. We have upcoming courses planned in San Francisco (December), Phoenix (January), and Sydney, Australia (February) in the next few months. If you have questions or would like to request training in your area of the world, please let us know.

Most of my posts about customer service remark about how poor it is, and how annoyed I get when incompetence wastes my time. So I’m pleased to write a post about the great service I received recently from Photojojo, an online photo site and store.

I was recently looking for the new Eye-fi Card, and all other online retailers were sold out or did not yet have the card in stock. I contacted Photojojo and asked if they had any in stock as I wanted to get the access early to show it off (SitePen worked with Eye-fi on the software for the card, and Eye-fi was out of cards). Photojojo was out of stock, but then wrote back that they had received more cards and would be able to ship one overnight.

Unfortunately, we just missed the cut-off time for overnight shipping, so they did some searching online, figured out where I was located, and said they could meet me in person if I was going to be in the Bay Area. It turns out one of their founders is based in San Francisco and had one Eye-fi Card with him. I accepted their offer, picked up the card, and was able to start showing it off right away.

I can’t imagine many companies going out of their way to accommodate a customer like this. Experiences like this are far too rare.

Now that Dojo 1.0 has shipped, the community is putting a lot of effort into finishing the new web site, updating tutorials, improving documentation, examples, and demos. And fixing bugs of course.

Even with the new launch of the web site next week, we know there’s going to be a lot we can do better, and sometimes this feedback gets lost in the noise. Please let us know how we can do better, what you find to be most lacking or most needing improvement. We’re tired of being told our documentation sucks, so now that we have pretty solid source code documentation, and a pretty comprehensive online book, what else can we add to make your life easier while using Dojo?

Feel free to comment here, send us email, file a ticket in trac, etc. And of course, if there’s a demo, example, tutorial, or documentation that you’ve created that you’d like to contribute, or at least have us link to, please let us know!

I’m happy to announce the launch of Comet Daily, a new site we’ve been working on to better explain Comet.

We have a number of great Comet developers writing original content for the site. Check it out and let us know what you think!

A new article, The Mojo of Dojo, by Matthew Russell (no relation to Alex) is now available, as is the short cut preview of his book, Get Up and Running with Dojo. These are great additions for learning about Dojo 1.0. The release candidate for 1.0 is due any hour now.

On the WebKit blog, Dave Hyatt announced that WebKit now has support for CSS Transforms. This is really interesting because it takes the matrix transformation possibilities from SVG, and moves them into CSS, allowing their application on any HTML element. I’d also bet that given WebKit and Safari 3’s solid SVG support, this was relatively easy to implement, so perhaps we’ll see this in other browsers. Dojo could provide this capability with dojox.gfx in today’s browsers, but perhaps we need to find a way to leverage the CSS syntax, ala Dean Edwards’ IE 7.

It’s cool to see the Mozilla Prism announcement. It’s another entry to the “Desktop Apps with Web Technologies” section of my post on the Proliferation of Web App Platforms. Interesting that it is also announced the day Leopard comes out, with its enhanced Cocoa bindings and Dashcode support. I’m curious to see if and how it will provide support for things like Dojo Offline and Google Gears, and other native storage providers. I’m also curious to see if this lets you sandbox apps with essentially different Firefox instances so that one poorly performing web app won’t crash the others currently in use.