dojo, responsive internet apps, hula, nevow
February 2nd, 2005 by Dylan
It’s no surprise to people that work with me that I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately on Dojo. This week, Jesse James Garrett wrote an article on A New Approach to Web Applications, and Matthew Haughey followed up with an article about the rise of web applications. They have both written excellent pieces, with one exception. They chose an awful name to describe these types of web applications that I just cannot endorse.
Related to this, nevow looks like a potentially interesting mod_pubsub analog, and Hula also looks promising.
Regarding Dojo itself, progress has been slower than we would like, but steady. We have finished a significant portion of the core “plumbing” for the project, and we also have our first widget, a button, that can be constructed from markup in HTML and SVG namespaces. We still have a lot of work to do on making our widget system better, especially in the world of SVG. The current SVG button could be described as hacky at best. A button is a surprisingly complex widget, at least if it is done with any sort of sane flexibility and constraints (cSVG and laszlo’s constraints mechanism). Other things we are actively working on include our event, IO, data binding, and dojoml, our xml application declaration language.