Note: The Dojo Quick Start Guide posts – while still relevant – are a bit dated. Please visit http://dojotoolkit.org/documentation/ for expert tutorials and API documentation to help you get up and running with Dojo. Ajax is an acronym for “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML”, a technology employed to send and receive data on the fly.

Google today announced Chrome Frame, a plug-in that selectively upgrades Internet Explorer without breaking existing sites. Think of it as working like Flash, but for open web technologies, replacing Internet Explorer’s entire rendering engine for sites that include a single meta tag indicating that they would prefer to use Chrome Frame rather than IE.

If you’re attending the Future of Web Apps conference in London in early October, be sure to introduce yourself. I’m excited to learn the results of the 2009 Web Application survey.

(or “Why JSON Hyper Schema means JSON doesn’t need XML’s namespacing colon cancer”) I recently posted a proposal for an addition to JSON Schema, called JSON Hyper Schema, for defining the properties of a JSON structure that represent links or references within data structures.

The Dojo-based Bespin project has added collaboration and social features so developers can more easily share code in real-time! Finally, a truly productive use of social networking for developers! By combining the benefits of SubEthaEdit and many of the social features you find on networking sites, the project is headed in a very useful direction

Recently, there’s been an increasing emphasis and enterprise-organized uprising focused on eliminating IE6 from the world as quickly as possible. For the unaware, supporting this outdated browser is expensive and limits our creative abilities when it comes to web development.

InfoQ recently conducted a virtual panel via email regarding how the JavaScript frameworks will evolve in order to take advantage of these new APIs. The panel featured representatives from some of the most widely deployed projects that deal with client-side JavaScript.

Recently Dojo 1.3 was released alongside project PlugD which adds jQuery flavor to the Dojo toolkit. InfoQ has a Q&A with Dylan Schiemann, CEO of SitePen and co-creator of Dojo about the latest release, the evolution of the toolkit and TIBCO’s General Interface choice to join the Dojo foundation.

In Part I of Queued and AIR issues, I talked about some of the challenges we faced during the development of Queued, our AIR application that allows you to manage your Netflix queues. In this post, I’ll discuss five other issues we ran across.

As part of our series on how we built Queued, today we’re going to talk about theming the Queued application, and touch on a few examples of what made putting the skin on Queued so much fun.

During the course of developing Queued, we ran across a number of challenges developing with AIR that we needed to solve. Some were very difficult to get around, while others were the result of our team needing to think outside the web-based paradigm.

Dojo is a very flexible toolkit; it doesn’t dictate how you organize your code or create your widgets. It simply provides tools, and it’s up to you to decide how you want to fit them together.

Visual Translation As with every SitePen project, we started out Queued with a set of written requirements that defined what the app should do. From that set of requirements, the design team began to define common user goals and create wireframes that detailed how the user would achieve these goals.

Last month, we announced Queued, an open-source application for managing your Netflix Queue. Queued is a desktop application created with web technologies and techniques including the Dojo Toolkit, and it is distributed as an Adobe AIR application to provide several performance boosting benefits from living on the desktop.

At first glance, the Persevere database looks like most of the others. You push pairs of keys and values into it, and it stores them away. But that’s just the beginning.

SitePen and uxebu are pleased to announce their first joint Dojo workshop in Munich, Germany. Come join some of the co-creators of Dojo on the 7th and 8th of May, 2009 to learn how to build great web sites and applications with Dojo.

New to Dojo 1.2+ is dojox.html.style. This is a collection of methods which give you the ability to query the stylesheets collection in a document, add and remove rules, and dynamically create new sheets.

Persevere‘s security system provides a powerful infrastructure for controlling access to a system by combining the best aspects of capability-based security with role-based security. Persevere has a full user management system and granular per-object access control with inheritance.

Dojo is big, but it’s not unwieldy. You don’t have to learn it all to be productive. There are probably large pieces of the toolkit that you’ll never even need, but Dojo is built so that if you don’t need something, it doesn’t weigh you down. Where it counts, Dojo is actually quite lean.

Persevere stores structured data in the same way data is represented in JavaScript and JSON. Various different data types can be persisted including numbers, strings, booleans, objects, arrays, dates, functions, and even binary data. Most of these data types are familiar to JavaScript developers; however, binary data is usually not seen in JavaScript.