Dylan Schiemann

I couldn’t resist wearing my Dojo shirt while doing the Trail 2 hike through the Cinque Terre in October:

Matthew Russell’s Dojo Book is the first book on the market exclusively about Dojo. It should be out in a few months.

On Comet Daily, Greg Wilkins and Michael Carter are currently going back and forth in a debate about Bayeux. I’m hopeful this discussion will help make Bayeux that much better for everyone interested in a Comet protocol.

Peter Higgins and I spent part of our evening assembling a collection of Dojo Community Resources, mostly in the form of
up do date tutorials and demos.

A while ago I mused about the rising price of gas. In the wake of the recent, dramatic 1.25% interest rate cuts, and the awesome campaign of Ron Paul, I started to wonder if there was a correlation between the devaluation of the dollar, inflation, the price of gold, and the price of oil.

It’s not easy to find great data, but I did find some rough numbers to work with from various online sources:

This is very inexact, ignores fees, commissions, assumes averaged costs, etc., but it still led to some interesting conclusions:

• A barrel of oil has risen from $27.39 in 2000 to $88.96 today (down from ~$100 earlier this year).
• If inflation was 5% per year, gas should be $38.54 per barrel today based on 2000 prices. Inflation has been reported as less than 5% over that time, but does not include the price of oil.
• If in 2000, you exchanged $68.65 for £, then today exchanged your £ back to $ and bought oil, you would save 23%, as you would now have $88.96 to buy a barrel of oil.
• If in 2000, you bought $27.39 in gold, you could sell it for $88.89, leaving you just $0.07 short in buying a barrel of oil!

The emphasis of the rising price of gas over the past 7 years has been that oil is a scarce commodity, and that the wars and turmoil in the middle east have led to a significant rise in price. What is not widely mentioned is that gold has kept pace with the rising price of oil! This makes me believe that the diminishing value of the dollar is the real reason for the increase in the cost of oil. European countries have done a better job by not printing money as aggressively as the US Federal Reserve, but nothing like the value of gold. Again, greatly oversimplified as I don’t have perfect data or time to research this, but it does enough to confirm my suspicions that things just weren’t adding up.

Dojo Developer Day 4 is coming February 7th and 8th, and is being graciously hosted by Google. Day 1 is primarily targeted towards contributors to the toolkit, with day 2 focused towards the greater development community. There is no cost to attend… simply send an RSVP email to rsvp -at- dojotoolkit *dot* org.

Also, on March 9th at the Salt Lick in Austin, TX, we’ll have the 4th annual Dojo BBQ event. If you’re attending SXSW or live near Austin, and want to join us, please let us know.

In preparation for their next Future of Web Apps conference, Carsonified is running a poll at Web App Charts to get feedback on your favorite web apps. I’m curious to hear the results, and see if things have changed recently, or if the early popular Ajax apps are still the most popular.

I’m pleased to announce that I recently accepted Aptana’s offer to join their advisory board, along with a number of other great people in the Ajax community. Aptana has just announced the release of Jaxer, dubbed “The Ajax Server.” So what exactly does that mean?

It means that JavaScript, the DOM, HTML, and CSS are now available on the server-side in a solid attempt to unify the development model for developers. There’s a customized version of Mozilla on the server-side that communicates with a standard web server such as Apache, and handles the web application requests. It also means toolkits such as Dojo are available for implementing features with a unified code base across the client and server (validation is probably the hello world example that comes to mind)!

1. Jaxer works closely with a web server to process and serve web content and respond to callback requests.
2. Jaxer reads HTML pages from the web server (Apache, Jetty, etc.) before they’re sent to the browser, processes them, and returns the processed HTML to the web server, which forwards them to the browser — there are no proprietary XML formats or browser plug-ins needed, it’s Ajax all the way.
3. Jaxer integrates the Mozilla engine — the industrial-strength engine that powers Firefox 3 — to provide rich, standards-based, well-tested parsing and APIs for HTML, CSS and JavaScript
4. To allow seamless calling of server-side JavaScript functions from the browser, Jaxer automatically injects a bit of JavaScript wrapper code into served pages. The actual server-side code remains securely on the server.
5. When you call a server-side JavaScript function from the browser, Jaxer wraps the function’s name and arguments in a JSON string, sends them via an XMLHttpRequest back to Jaxer (via the web server), which unwraps the information, calls your server-side function, wraps the results back in JSON, and returns them to the browser, which unwraps them and passes them back as if the server-side function was running right in your browser.

There are a number of great screencasts available as well:
Validation, Server-side DOM, Counter, and Jaxer Studio Features.

A number of very creative approaches make life easier and more powerful for developers of web apps, and Aptana is playing a key role in contributing to this metamorphosis.

Just as most great software comes with an undo command, so should government. The closest thing we have currently in the US is Ron Paul. I’m voting for Ron Paul to undo the major problems caused by the current administration, and much of the governmental policies of the 20th and 21st centuries.

After his presidency, Ron Paul’s nickname can evolve from Dr. No to Dr. Undo!

Congratulations to John Lilly on being named the new Mozilla CEO! John is a great person to work with, and deeply understands the needs of the Open Web. I expect this to be great for Mozilla and for John.