Dijit has a tremendous wealth of high quality and feature-rich form elements providing key functionality including validation, time calculation, spinner controls, calendars, and much more. Furthermore, Dijit gives you a set of themes to choose from: Tundra, Soria, Noir, and Nihilo.

Silicon Valley Web Builder has a series of monthly panels on topics of interest to web application developers. I had the opportunity to attend a pair of events recently, once as a speaker, once as an attendee, and the contrast between the two was intriguing.

There are fundamental differences between the roles of application code and framework library modules within an application. Framework libraries provide reusable services that encapsulate lower-level functionality in an abstraction that offers functionality with an easy to use API for higher level code within a variety of different applications.

I’m excited to announce a new open source project created by SitePen and co-sponsored by Adobe: Queued. With Queued, you can manage your Netflix queue anytime, anywhere! It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Dojo here.

Performing frequent training courses has given SitePen a chance to learn new ways to improve our training approach. Some concepts in JavaScript can be trickier than others and as we interact with the classes, we’re able to develop fun explanations for these tricky concepts.

With the proliferation of real web browsers on mobile devices (iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Nokia), an increasing number of browsers (Chrome) or browser-like platforms (AIR, Titanium, Jaxer), portal standards for widgets and gadgets (Caja, AdSafe, work by the OpenAjax Alliance, and much more), are the days numbered for a JavaScript toolkit that uses the same

Persevere‘s latest release includes new functionality for creating clean, organized application directory structures, complete with a testing framework. Persevere now has an improved set of command-line options including a server generator, which makes it easy to build an application server directory that can be version controlled separately from the Persevere core files.

With their announcement of the Pre last week, Palm has placed their bet that great mobile applications can be built using the same open web technologies that drive the desktop environment today.

As 2008 wraps up, there are a number of announcements and noteworthy items surrounding Dojo, DWR, Persevere, and SitePen services.

I’ve just completed the upgrade of the DojoX FileUploader to make it compatible with Flash Player 10. The FileUploader widget allows for the uploading of more than one file at a time, which is surprisingly still not supported natively by any web browser on the market today.

The JsonRestStore is a Dojo Data store that provides a JSON-based RESTful interface to servers and implements the Dojo Data read, write, notification, and identity APIs. One of the core concepts of a REST architecture is hyperlinking, and this is available in the JsonRestStore through it’s referencing support.

Is it time to bring your team up to speed with Ajax, Open Source, and the real technologies of the web? Or perhaps you want to increase your marketability in a tough economy. Or maybe you’re looking to allocate a small portion of your company budget to continuing education.

I’m excited to announce a new BSD-licensed project created by SitePen and co-sponsored by Adobe: Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR. This new effort creates a new namespace, dair, making it even easier to create rich desktop apps, such as the Dojo Toolbox, using the Dojo Toolkit and Adobe AIR.

Security in Ajax web applications is of growing importance. While the client-server model is very useful for architecting web applications, the web security is model is not client-server, but rather a client-deputy-server model.

I gave a talk on Dojo Wednesday at ZendCon, and when I walked into the room for the talk, there was some disorder as the conference center staff were taking out the tables to fit more chairs in.

Recently, using the Deft project, I created a multi-file uploader Flash component for DojoX. It uses a typical design pattern—embed a hidden SWF in the web page, and with the ExternalInterface, trigger the FileReference’s browse() method to open a system dialog.

The programmers in the trenches of Web development can breathe a bit easier now that a major committee planning the future of the JavaScript standard has decided to focus on small, incremental changes that will improve the performance in Web browsers.

Ajax, which was been a key goal for integration into the Zend Framework in the last release, also gets a boost. The Dojo Framework which is a popular Ajax library, will now be directly integrated into Zend Framework 1.6.

A new top-level package was recently added to the Dojo Toolkit called Deft — an acronym for Dojo Experimental Flex Technology. The Deft package was created and is maintained by SitePen’s Tom Trenka, taking advantage of Adobe’s new MPL licensing, and the corresponding APIs of the Flash Player.

Google and Yahoo have JavaScript APIs that let you perform searches. Wikipedia has a JavaScript API that lets you grab data from its pages. These APIs can be accessed cross-domain with a transport method known as JSONP.