Last Thursday I was lucky enough to get over to the highly regarded web development conference ffconf in Brighton. This was my first time at the event and I can say that it lived up to and even exceeded my expectations.
Many modern web applications depend on JavaScript. When the complexity of your JavaScript increases, so does the maintenance cost. To improve the maintenance of complex JavaScript codebases, you most likely adhere to some clean code practices in your codebase.
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Recently I was fortunate to be able to attend the Google Polymer Summit in Copenhagen with a SitePen colleague. Having attended the PWA Summit last year in Amsterdam we were expecting a well organised and interesting conference, and we were not to be disappointed.
For a concise read on why the enterprise should care about using TypeScript in its applications, look no further than Remo Jansen of the Aon Centre for Innovation and Analytics’ presentation on the 6 reasons you should be using TypeScript.
To quote professional zoologist Jim Fowler, “The biggest challenge is how to affect public attitudes and make people care.” When a small startup has a big idea, they run into an even bigger challenge.
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.
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.
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.
Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama. It’s time to introduce our Bahamas native, Neil Roberts! Neil brings his expertise to work everyday, but there’s much more to him than API design, code architecture, and regular expressions. Join us as we learn more about one of our talented software engineers.
The first thing you need to know about Audrey is that she’s the new girl and she’s turning out to be just as cool as another infamous New Girl we know! I say this because during her first week at SitePen, she fearlessly entered the Apple Bobbing contest and stuck her head in a bucket
I had the opportunity to speak and attend FullStack 2015 organised by Skills Matter and hosted at their CodeNode location in central London.
The one thing I would have you know about Ed is that he’s a real-life renaissance man.
The V8 team (the JavaScript engine that powers Chrome, Opera, Node.js, MongoDB, etc…) are moving forward with an experiment in defining a stronger version of JavaScript that ensures that code being run is behaving well, and introducing run-time typing based on TypeScript’s typings.
In this post, we’re getting to know Eric Heasley. A technical project manager and a gentleman, Eric can usually be found in the trenches, getting the job done.
Transpiling or compiling code has become a necessity today for JavaScript-based web development. Whether you are using TypeScript, Babel, Dart, Traceur, or CoffeeScript to provide additional language features, or trying to optimise your code with the likes of UglifyJS, r.
As a developer, I had worked in the past with certified and degree-wielding project managers. They knew the rules. They knew waterfall, agile, Gantt charts, specs, and all those wonderful bits and pieces that seem to be second nature to the project management world. I, as a developer, didn’t pay much attention.
In line with SitePen’s continued growth, we’re excited to announce that Kitson Kelly has joined the SitePen team as our new Chief Technology Officer. Kitson, who usually goes by just Kit, brings a wealth of technical knowledge and engineering leadership, as well as some interesting British humour to the table.
The Situation Deadlines are looming and it looks like it’s is going to come down to the wire. A developer has hit a roadblock while trying to integrate code from another team and connect it to a third-party API. He can’t figure out where things are going wrong.
At the end of 2014, we looked ahead to determine where to focus SitePen’s open source efforts in the coming year.
Good news everyone! Now that summer is over, there’s no more heat to complain about! That just leaves, ah yes, the bitter cold.
What a great year 2013 has been! We’re feeling (collectively) like Ebenezer Scrooge in the final chapters of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – except we haven’t been jerks up ’til now and we think working at SitePen is a year-round Christmas vacation, unlike the earlier chapters wherein Scrooge forces poor Mr.
A common error when using Dijits is “Tried to register widget with id==XXX but that id is already registered”. That is the dijit/registry telling us that we’ve made a mistake instantiating a widget. When a widget is initialized, it identifies itself with registry using its id which registry expects to be unique.
Dijit widgets provide the ability to write custom setters and getters, whose logic is executed when calling the set and get methods. dijit/_WidgetBase also provides a _set method, which is very important when writing widgets, but can cause a bit of confusion due to its name.
A concept that is often confusing to new JavaScript developers is the idea of function context, specifically as it relates to the value of this. For example, methods in Java are bound to classes at compile time, and this in a method call will always refer to an instance of the method’s class.
One pretty common issue we get in the dojo-interest mailing list asks why RoundRectStoreList.set(“store”, store); doesn’t actually appear to be setting the store properly? That is, the data in the RoundRectStoreList doesn’t actually render the data in the new store, but instead keeps old data rendered.
As dgrid’s adoption continues to rise, one of the most common questions developers ask is how to add filtering controls. Unlike some grid implementations, dgrid does not include an out-of-the-box component implementing a user interface for filtering. This leaves some developers unsure of where to begin.
Want to learn Dojo in 2013? Great! We want to teach you and coincidentally we have just completed a total revamp of our entire line of Dojo Workshops! Sign up today and get Dojo 101 for FREE Since this is the season for giving, we've decided to do just that! We are giving away our
Debugging JavaScript can be a tedious and frustrating chore. To compound the already difficult task of debugging, browser vendors each have their own style of error messaging, some of which are confusing, cryptic, or downright misleading to the untrained eye.
Want an easy way to keep up with SitePen efforts on Dojo, dgrid, AMD, JavaScript, and the open web? Then click the Keep In Touch button at the end of this blog and sign up now! To see what types of things you can expect, check out the July edition of the SitePen Insider! With
SitePen was contacted by FieldAware when CTO Andronikos Nedos was tasked with building a highly interactive, bespoke, work scheduler widget using Dojo.
Linus Ekström of Stockholm-based EPiServer shares his early dgrid experience with SitePen. Here’s what he had to say. SitePen: How did you learn about dgrid? EPiServer: The Dojo website and SitePen blogs. SitePen: Why did you choose dgrid? EPiServer: The existing DojoX DataGrid was too complex to set up and extend.
As a SitePen customer, Øyvind Aaraas of KLP decided to try out dgrid on one of his company’s web applications. When asked about his early experience with dgrid, here’s what he had to say! SitePen: How did you learn about dgrid? KLP: We follow the SitePen blog and learned of it there.
After many months of work, Dojo 1.8 Beta is almost here. We expect beta to be ready for use on June 22, 2012, with the final 1.8 release due 4-6 weeks later! dojo/request We’re very excited about this release for many reasons.
“Small businesses embody the spirit of innovation and they are the lifeblood of our economy,” says David Chavern, U.S. Chamber executive vice president and chief operating officer. We think so too, David! It’s said that small business — firms with fewer than 500 employees — drive the U.S.
Dylan wrapped up his 2012 Dojo tour last week, presenting twice at IBM Impact 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Over the last few weeks, Dylan has given talks across the western United States and Europe and we’ve tracked his every move on our blog. Dylan will finish his trip with stops in Tempe, AZ and Las Vegas, Nevada. Phoenix Mobile Festival. Tempe, AZ. April 21.
Continuing on his road trip, Dylan presented AMD in Depth at the London Ajax User Group meeting on April 10th. Over 80 optimistic and energetic developers attended the engaging presentation. Want to learn more about AMD? Check out the presentation on our SlideShare page. Next stop for Dylan? Phoenix Mobile Festival on April 21.
Dylan travelled to IUT, a modern technical university in Béziers, France, to present the keynote talk at Web-5. Over 70 people attended his AMD and stores presentation.
The 2012 ESRI Developer Summit is attended by 1,700 developers, half are attending for the first time and thirty percent are from international locations! Dylan continues to mingle with like-minded Dojo enthusiasts from around the world, including people from the US, Canada, UAE, Japan, England, Germany, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands!
Dylan arrived in Palm Springs on Saturday with hundreds of other ESRI Partners just in time to participate in the Jim Christoffersen Golf Classic. The four-player shamble event took place on the south course at the Indian Canyons Golf Resort.
Dylan has a full schedule of events from March to May! We are excited about the awesome opportunities we will have over the next couple of months to support our clients, teach more Dojo, and, hopefully, meet you! If you will be attending any of the events listed, and want to chat with Dylan while
We hear it a lot. You want to learn Dojo, especially now that Dojo 1.7 is released, but you don’t know how to ask your boss. We’ve pulled together some tools you might be able to use. What to say Here’s a sample script.
Hot on the heels of the Dojo 1.7.1 release, we are excited to officially publish SitePen’s 1.7-specific updates to not one, not two but ALL 55 Dojo 1.6 tutorials. As you can guess, this was no small feat given that Dojo 1.
Most 2012 trend lists include 12 trends. (Get it? 12 in ’12. Of course you do.). Because we are not fond of adding unnecessary or filler content (read code), Dylan has come up with 11 trends for 2012. 1. Mobile Mobile will gain even more momentum in 2012.
Welcome to 2012 – The Year of Dojo! We are expecting an amazing year! Make SitePen your one stop shop for all of your web application needs; Dojo workshops, JavaScript support and web app development. Together, with SitePen, you will meet your 2012 goals! When you’re happy, so are we.
If you’ve been reading about Dojo 1.7, the first thing you’re probably wondering is, what is this AMD thing that everyone is talking about? Check out Dylan’s post at the Dojo Toolkit blog to “Learn more about AMD!“.
2012 Year of Dojo SitePen is so dedicated to providing you with the highest quality Dojo Toolkit education in the industry that we will be in 11 states, providing 22 Dojo Workshops throughout 2012. Whether you want to learn the basics of Dojo or sharpen your Dojo skills, we have a workshop just for you.
SitePen’s Dylan Schiemann delivered the last of his three Rich Web Experience 2011 presentations yesterday, Never Bet Against the Open Web. Dylan had this to say about his time at #RWX2011: The level of interest in AMD, object stores, and mobile is impressive.
SitePen’s Dylan Schiemann delivered a powerful keynote, Real Time, Real Fast, during the opening ceremony of Rich Web Experience 2011 last night in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
SitePen’s CEO, and co-founder of the Dojo Toolkit, Dylan Schiemann will be kicking off Rich Web Experience 2011 with an engaging Real Time, Real Fast keynote address. His talk will cover WebSocket, one of the hottest new APIs in HTML5, which enables true duplex communication without the overhead, complexity, and extraneous latency of HTTP-based solutions.
Featured as one of three sessions to see on Monday’s web track at the BlackBerry DevCon Americas conference in San Francisco this week, SitePen’s CEO Dylan Schiemann presented Make Beautiful Apps Faster Using the Dojo Mobile Toolkit.
Do you want to learn in depth details to create web applications with Dojo and Dijit? Join us in Seattle on November 16th for our 2-day Dojo Skills workshop. Dojo Skills emphasizes some of the unique advantages Dojo offers in cross-browser charts and user interface widgets through a powerful development model.
SitePen was in full effect at DojoConf 2011. Not only did we lead up to the conference with our amazing tutorials, we also impressed with our intense knowledge of all things Dojo. In case you missed it, or if you just want to see them again, here are our presentations.
Join us for our introductory jUMP into Dojo (1 day) or our Dojo Skills (2 days) workshop – or both!- on November 1 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
We’re 28 days away and as promised we’re releasing a tutorial everyday until DojoConf 2011! Here’s today’s tutorial! Using Dojo Data Dojo Data is the legacy data interface used to abstract data consumers (like widgets) from the concerns of data providers. While the new object store interface has superseded the dojo.
We just happen to have another reason to be in Chicago next week! We had a blast with the folks at Vodori last time so, we’ll buy the next round! Join us for a beer on July 27, 2011! REGISTER TODAY!
Mad Dojo Skillz Denver, CO – Aug 1-2, 2011 $1599 Mad Dojo Skillz is our black diamond workshop taking the expert scripter through the expert techniques needed when tackling the unique problems web applications can throw and how to utilize Dojo to make applications usable, reliable and scalable.
jUMP into Dojo Des Moines, IA – Aug 5, 2011 $599 jUMP into Dojo gives you a rapid introduction to the capabilities of Dojo as well as the experience in applying them to solve real-world problems.
Next in our series of Dojo Tutorials, we have the first of three tutorials on the DataGrid! You asked. We listened. Let’s talk about the DataGrid. The DataGrid is the central component of many applications due to its effective and usable presentation of tabular data.
More dates!! Cheaper options!! More locations! Beer! WE HEAR YOU! Join us for any number of workshops across the US and rest assured, you’ll get a brain-load of code and we’ll even throw in a pizza and a (dojo.
Join us for foo, folks and fun! We just wanted to throw out a quick invite, to all the Silicon Valley-based JavaScripters out there, to join a couple of our boys for a couple of drinks! Meet us, meet Dojo, meet the bartender — whatever your angle — Let us know you’re coming!
Communication. Lead. Serve. Clarity. Doc. Launch. Self-direct. Excel. If it does, come make poetry with us! We’re hiring Senior Technical Project Managers who want to get their project on.
Next in our ongoing series of Dojo mobile tutorials, we create the Settings View of our TweetView app. TweetView: Creating the Settings View In the previous post, Getting Started with TweetView: Tweets and Mentions, we solidified our mobile application’s file structure, reviewed TweetView’s goals, and created the Tweets and Mentions views by coding tweetview._ViewMixin andtweetview.TweetView.
Next in our ongoing series of Dojo tutorials, learn what’s available Beyond Dojo’s Core. More than just DOM and Ajax One of the things that differentiates Dojo from many other JavaScript libraries is its scope. While you can simply use dojo.
Our series of Dojo tutorials continues with Deferreds and Promises. This is great, we Promise! Deferreds are a wonderful and powerful thing, but they’re really an implementation of something greater – a promise. A promise is an object that represents the eventual value returned from the completion of an operation.
You called and sent postcards, you emailed, you blogged, you petitioned outside of Trader Joe’s, ran ads on public access and someone even sent a fax — MESSAGE RECEIVED! We’ll hold a public workshop (or two).
There’s really no obvious “winner” in the Apple vs. Adobe spat. While both sides make some good points, they miss the mark on many details as well. First, Steve, we appreciate your bold Thoughts on Flash, but a few comments: Steve, Apple did not invent WebKit… you rewrote Konqueror and KHTML.
Persevere 1.0 is now available for download. Persevere is a JavaScript storage and application server that uses a standards-based interface of HTTP/REST, JSON-RPC, JSONPath, and REST Channels. Persevere is designed for rich client applications and can be used with any framework or client.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
As 2008 wraps up, there are a number of announcements and noteworthy items surrounding Dojo, DWR, Persevere, and SitePen services.
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.
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.
NOTE: This post is out of date.
In the middle of May, we were given a mission: create a speedy, offline API documentation viewer and a graphical Dojo build tool. Here we are at the beginning of July, and the result is the Dojo Toolbox 1.0. This article is a first look at this new application.
MAMP is an easy way to get a basic MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment running. Each package in the stack is configured such that it’s easy to drop the MAMP directory into /Applications and serve up a database-backed PHP site.
This is the final part of our three part series on porting Dojo methods to Flash. In part one of our series, we implemented Dojo’s hitch method, and then used hitch in part two, where we made our connect method.
Adobe recently announced their new Open Screen project, which opens the licensing of the Flash Player and much more. We’re celebrating this event with a three part series on Dojo and ActionScript and previewing some of the work by the Dojo team.
There’s been some breaking news from Adobe, announcing their Open Screen project. As of today, they are opening the licensing of the Flash Player, FLV/F4V video, publishing the AMF protocol and device APIs for the player, and more. This is great news for businesses, developers, and the Open Web in general.
At SitePen, we’re dedicated to creating excellent user experiences and writing clean, beautiful code. Because of this, we’ve earned a reputation as being advocates, advisers and teachers to our friends, colleagues, and clients.
Much like a magpie, I find myself oddly infatuated with shiny things. When a UI component somewhere just screams elegance, I find myself compelled to use it. A lot of the time a simple right-click will indicate the said UI was implemented in Flash, and it loses a tiny piece of street-cred.
Since Dojo 1.1 was released a week ago, several outlets have published articles: Dojo 1.1 Refines Ajax Development – Features SitePen’s Peter Higgins and Alex Russell with their thoughts on Dojo 1.1, and a comprehensive summary of what’s new with the 1.
As programming languages go, Python is hot. It was TIOBE’s language of the year in 2007 because of its fast growth. Python’s performance, while certainly good enough for most applications, is middle of the road in the grand scheme of languages.
We recently added JSONPath support to the Dojo Toolkit. In the Dojo Toolkit 1.1, JSONPath queries can now be executed by calling dojox.jsonPath.query. JSONPath is a powerful tool for extracting data from JavaScript data objects, and has query capabilities that are similar to those of XPath queries on XML, except applied to JSON originating data.
We’re very excited about our new commercial support offering for the Dojo Toolkit, DWR, and Cometd. So what is SitePen Support and what do we have to offer? Advice When getting started with something different or new, there’s rarely documentation or a tutorial that addresses things in quite the right way.
It’s not very often that I get to work on some software that has the potential to appeal to developers, testers, designers, and the marketing team all at once.
Joe was recently interviewed by InfoQ about DWR 3.0 as a preview of his presentation on Comet and DWR at QCon. Key points about DWR 3.0 include: Offline Support (Google Gears and/or Dojo Offline) TIBCO General Interface integration Aptana Jaxer integration OpenAjax Hub, PubSub, Bayeux, etc.
Over the past few years designing and developing I’ve come to rely on a number of tools. Most of these are obvious like Photoshop and Firebug, however I’ve come to realize that a few tools I use aren’t as well known.
Mobile application development has many challenges. The announcement of Google Gears on Mobile Devices will help solve the problems of network connectivity, network latency, and limited bandwidth. On the desktop, a lot of the focus on Gears was its ability to allow applications to function when your computer was not connected to the network.
SitePen was in the news recently: Simplexity Rising: Web usability reveals itself to be a game of hide-and-seek covers our session, “Your Mom, 2.0”, for the upcoming SXSW 2008, and offers some choice quotes about building web apps that are feature rich yet easy to use.
From a recent interview with Kevin Hakman on Ajaxian: “I personally love the ability to write a script that runs on the server, but call it from the client as if it were running on the client.
While the media has beat us to the punch with countless “on AIR” puns (and the list of companies using the word air grows), we completed work to make the Dojo Toolkit compatible with Adobe AIR in time for its recent launch.
I’ve just had a whirlwind trip to Stockholm for JFokus 2008. It was a focused conference with some really interesting presentations. I came back wishing that I wasn’t on such a tight schedule so that I could have attended more talks.
With the release of the iPhone 1.1.3 firmware update, Apple has given us the ability to create custom “webclip” icons (think “favicon” for your iPhone and iPod Touch) by adding a special file called “apple-touch-icon.png” to the root of your website (same place as the favicon).
As we kick off 2008, I’m pleased and extremely excited to announce that we’ve added some awesome, new talent to the SitePen team. Eugene Lazutkin is highly respected in Dojo circles for his work on Drag-n-drop, GFX (2D and 3D), Charting, and many other crucial 0.9 and 1.0 features.