Dylan Schiemann

On Friday, I had the opportunity to give a Dojo update at Mozilla. Spending time with the Mozillans is always a great honor, as their hard work makes our development efforts possible and much more pleasant. Mozilla co-sponsored Dojo’s summer internship program (along with SitePen, and the Google Summer of Code), and this was a brief session to show off the fruits of that labor, namely dojo.gfx.

Brendan Eich reminded me that we are so highly motivated to work with the landscape (i.e. suffer through pain when the browser doesn’t do as we expect), we as toolkit developers, can and should do more to get what we need out of our browsers. Sometimes we become so pragmatic in trying to fix everything in the browsers ourselves that we forget to remind Mozilla, Apple, Opera, and Microsoft of the pain we suffer. Providing testcases to show where they can do better, and getting a real clear sense of exactly what causes significant performance bottlenecks should be a major goal for Dojo in 2007 as we continue our efforts to make JavaScript development easier and more powerful.