While there are many challenges today with building web applications, there are also many options to address the issues we face with technology, process, and people, allowing us to reap the benefits of the web as an application platform.

Web applications provide many benefits. Most organizations seek to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes through the use of software. The benefits of web applications include: Simple distribution model for end users (e.g. no installation required) Instant propagation of changes Unified code base to support many platforms (desktop, tablet, mobile, etc.

One of the additions of the recent Dojo 1.11 release is a modern flat theme created with the Stylus preprocessor. The flat theme allows you to apply a modern, flat look and feel to existing Dojo applications.

Intern‘s Leadfoot API makes it easier to author functional tests in JavaScript. One of the fundamental concepts for authoring functional tests is to access an element within a page to test it.

Peter Higgins, former project lead for Dojo, gave an excellent talk at JSConf in 2013 titled “Dojo Already Did That” (which reflected a humorous meme started at the first JSConf). It was highly informative about how Dojo had already solved problems that the JavaScript community were solving again in 2013.

Until a few years ago, our testing efforts with Dojo were focused on the Dojo Object Harness (DOH), a very early unit and functional testing suite.

If you’re familiar with Dojo 1, you’re probably familiar with declare. Declare provides a flexible but controlled way to handle inheritance in JavaScript. It builds on JavaScript’s prototypal inheritance with OO (Object Oriented) principles and provides single and multiple inheritance. This enables developers to create flexible components and powerful mixins.

QCon Beijing happened last week and I had the opportunity to travel and give a talk as one of the few American speakers. Most notably, all talks were delivered in Mandarin which was a bit of a challenge given that I don’t speak Mandarin.

Last fall, Mozilla announced its Mozilla Open Source Support program, specifically focused on supporting the Free & Open Source Software movement.

Intern, via the Leadfoot WebDriver library, provides a lot of low-level control over the browsers it uses to run tests. Tests can navigate to new pages, resize the browser window, examine elements on a page, and interact with controls like inputs and buttons. Unfortunately, with all this power can come great complexity.

Symbols are a new, unique, primitive type introduced in ECMAScript 6 (ES6). They were added to the language in order to solve the problem of extending the functionality of Object while maintaining backwards-compatibility with code written in earlier versions of JavaScript.

I attended the Microsoft Edge Web Summit in San Francisco. I will be honest, outside of meeting a few people, I wasn’t expecting much. Instead, I found myself face-to-face with the “new” Microsoft.

Esri, the creators of great mapping technology, hosts their DevSummit every March in Palm Springs, CA. Esri creates their popular ArcGIS for JavaScript API by leveraging the Dojo Toolkit. Esri trends Each year Esri announces a number of new features and technologies at the DevSummit, and this year was no exception.

We’ve recently made a number of updates to Intern, providing additional flexibility and integration for writing and running tests. Seth Holladay and sitecues by Ai Squared generously sponsored some of these efforts! Continuous integration Intern has long supported continuous integration, officially supporting travis-ci, Jenkins, and TeamCity.

We’d like to introduce you to a gal who’s always bringing wit and interesting conversation to the table. She’s a rocking project manager and an expert at keeping our clients and team happy. Aside from her work at SitePen, she has an ongoing list of amazing talents.

One of the nice features of testing with Intern and Leadfoot is the ease of authoring functional tests to mimic end-user behavior. The API for retrieving relevant DOM nodes is relatively straightforward, usually with a single line of code needed to get a reference to the relevant node.

It’s been over a year since the release of dgrid 0.4, which brought about some major changes, including integration with the new dstore API. Since then, we (and others) have used it in numerous applications, and we’ve continued to refine it. Now, at long last, we’re proud to announce dgrid 1.

Do you know anyone that has the ability to make everyone smile? Can throw hilarious animated gifs into a chat conversation in less than a second? Who’s just plain fun to hang out with? We do! It’s Nick! The first time we met, he was ready to bob for apples… in a horse mask.

Last weekend at the Omni resort on Amelia Island, FL, the last JSConf US took place. The Williams family is no longer able to run this conference, so with much sadness it will not be continuing in its current form. The JavaScript community legacy they have left behind is nothing short of astounding.

Picture this: 100+ developers and their phones and laptops making crashing noises playing a live-created clone of Flappy Bird. Now picture the same devices working together to create a live MIDI concert, followed by a challenging and fun JavaScript pub quiz.