As a first-time JSConf attendee, I happily embraced the welcoming culture and fun atmosphere – surfing, anyone? But I was even more impacted by the presentations centered around JavaScript expanding beyond the browser, using JavaScript to help others, and the focus on community.
Augmented Reality (AR) brings digital information or media and interweaves it with our experience of the real-world. In recent years Augmented Reality has become apparent in the consumer space in two major formats: head mounted displays such as the Microsoft HoloLens and the Magic Leap along with more widely available experiences on mobile devices.
Maintaining software is challenging. Stagnant software quickly becomes obsolete and this couldn’t be truer than in the JavaScript ecosystem.
SitePen participates in a number of conferences around the world presenting new technology and ideas to engineers and designers. Recently Dylan Schiemann and Tom Dye spoke at the HalfStack Conference in London and Paul Shannon spoke at Phoenix TypeScript meetup.
All Things Open is a large, community-created open source conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, with nearly 4,000 attendees and 20 concurrent sessions. At this year’s event, I was invited to deliver a talk similar to one I had presented at JSConf titled “React Already Did That.
The 2018 edition of the Node+JS Interactive conference featured nearly 1,000 JavaScript and Node.js enthusiasts at the first combined event organized by the Node.js Foundation and JS Foundation. The event included nearly 100 sessions, panels, and community events designed to help grow and foster the JavaScript ecosystem.
At this month’s FullStack London 2018, our CEO, Dylan Schiemann, presented the talk “Choosing a Framework”, based on our Choosing a Framework blog series. Given our long history in web development, we’ve seen JavaScript evolve from an obscure simplistic scripting language to the language of the internet.
For many front-end developers, components have become a central concept in their development workflow. Components provide a robust model for architecting and scaling complex applications, allowing for composition from smaller and simpler encapsulated parts.
Nest is a scalable framework for building server-side applications. It is authored in TypeScript and relies on the Express framework. It leans heavily on modern language features such as async/await and decorators to reduce cruft and place the focus cleanly on route-handling business logic.
Picture lots and lots of dogs wearing vests Now, are you thinking of a Lewis Carroll-esque canine tea party, or a collection of service dogs? If the latter, you may be ready to attend the thankfully-abbreviated California State University: Northridge Assistive Technology Conference (hereafter referred to as CSUN or #CSUNATC18).
WebAssembly is an emerging standard for a low-level assembly-like language in a compact binary format that runs with near-native performance, and is available as a compilation target for a variety of languages. We’ve heard significant misunderstanding around WebAssembly and what it means for the web and JavaScript.
In case you missed it, SitePen was the presenting sponsor of the inaugural TSConf which took place in Seattle on March 12, 2018! The Backstory In 2017, we met the TypeScript team in person after years of being avid members and contributors to the TypeScript project.
It is like the old proverb, “It takes a village to raise a web framework.
“Blockchain” is the newest term to enter the tech industry’s buzzword repertoire. Whether a company is processing sub-second banking transactions or transporting artisanal goat cheeses across state lines, it seems as though any company not investigating this technology, the same technology that powers infamous cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, will surely go the way of the dodo.
As we create and improve open source software, and build many applications for our customers, we’re constantly looking for things that will improve the software we create. Part of this is looking at an often dizzying array of proposed and emerging standards, and finding those that feel efficient and ready for use.
Previously on Web Frameworks, we looked at how various frameworks deal with the concept of applications. Akin to listening to the whole album, we got a sense of how the frameworks pull it all together.
Applications built with web technologies, something that was a curiosity a few short years ago, have emerged onto the scene as a must have for most organizations. Transcending websites and providing users with a more open and unbounded experience, web applications are everywhere.
A significant amount of work on JavaScript toolkits and frameworks has centered around trying to fix, normalize, and optimize browser implementations. Doing so requires making many assumptions about what the problems are, how our tools will be used by developers, and what we expect of the future.
We have previously discussed the look and feel of web frameworks. While we often become interested in a framework based on the stylishness of the widgets and applications it can create, this may lead to a similar approach to how we have historically selected music.
While instruments such as guitar and drums are part of a band, how they are used by the musicians define the style of the band’s music. Similarly, the elements of an application user interface connected together define the user experience.
…we would all be using justin-bieber.js. We as an organization have been working with JavaScript since 2000. We have seen frameworks rise and fall, including being responsible for some of them. We have seen trends come and go. We have seen browser dominance ebb and flow. We have seen winners and losers.
As we noted in our post about the open and incremental approach to TC39, one of the challenges facing TC39 is that it has grown in size substantially along with the community interest in JavaScript.
Last month we looked at various approaches to scaling enterprise development, and the challenges found within development organizations in our Time for InnerSource? post. This month we continue looking at the need for InnerSource by taking a closer look at the Law of Diminishing Returns.
dojox/gfx is Dojo 1.x’s vector graphics library, with support for SVG, Canvas, and other legacy rendering environments through a drawing API based on the semantics of SVG. This API also provides the foundation for dojox/charting. Often the biggest challenge in working with vector graphics is the large number of possible configuration settings and permutations.
Over the past several months, the SitePen team has been hard at work on Dojo 2 along with the tools and infrastructure to support it. Part of that infrastructure, and one of the major priorities for Dojo 2, is to have top notch developer documentation, complete with examples, tutorials, and API documentation.
InnerSource is a series of strategies and tactics from the open source world that help companies share source code across teams.
As we near the finalization of the proposal, it’s looking like ES8 is going to deliver much more than the simple updates of its ES7 predecessor! We wanted to take a few moments to highlight our 5 favorite things about the upcoming 2017 release.
Functional programming and reactive programming principles are not new to JavaScript, but their adoption has recently become widespread across most modern frameworks and toolkits.
The motivation for Intern 4 is to make it easier to author tests with ES6+ features within tests, with or without transpilation. Want to skim? Here’s the Intern Roadmap which lists our high level status for each Intern release going forward.
Introducing Milestone Mayhem With years of building large scale web apps, we’ve experienced almost everything that goes right and wrong during software development projects. So we created Milestone Mayhem, a card game that reflects the challenges and successes with app development.
As the new year starts to unfold, it’s time to take a quick look at the things our team at SitePen resolves to do this year.
Thanks to a generous Mozilla Open Source Support program award, Intern has expanded its testing ecosystem to include new and robust sets of tools. Engineers can now easily write tests to benchmark sections of code, test for accessibility (a11y) support, and test for visual differences.
Intern already has a wide array of capabilities and today we’re pleased to announce one more: accessibility testing. Thanks to a generous award from Mozilla Open Source Support we’ve created the intern-a11y plugin, which allows users to run accessibility tests on pages or components using Intern.
Today we’re pleased to announce the release of Intern 3.4. This release brings usability enhancements and bugfixes, including a new benchmarking mode! We’ve outlined some of the features below, but as always, visit the release notes for more details. A number of contributors made this release possible.
Now in its 7th year, Web Summit is the world’s largest web conference, with more than 50,000 people in attendance. The conference possibly draws inspiration from SXSW Interactive, with a European twist. Each year it brings an impressive agenda of speakers and attendees from around the world.
This October, we delivered meetup talks on WebVR in London and Phoenix on the same day to share our early efforts in exploring WebVR with TypeScript, Dojo 2, Intern, and A-Frame.
The official name of the rebranded and relaunched merging of the jQuery Foundation and the Dojo Foundation is the JS Foundation.
SafetyNet is an annual conference hosted by Pulsiam and is focused on trends in software for the safety industry.
We were recently asked by the team at eQuorum to investigate an issue with dgrid performance when leveraging the dgrid/Tree mixin. The issue was challenging to solve, so we thought it would be useful to share our story in debugging and solving it.
One of the main challenges with creating modern JavaScript web applications is the relatively incomplete approach to ES modules. As an interim solution until all necessary use cases are solved, many developers create source code with ESM, and then transpile to either AMD, CJS, or UMD for easy usage within today’s browsers.
Over the past few years, TypeScript has iterated and greatly improved developer ergonomics.
Recently on GitHub, someone accused Dojo 2 of being vapourware. This opinion came from a position of misinformation. I was glad the individual then engaged with the Dojo 2 project to understand where we are today. We are making swift progress and a beta is on the horizon.
Intern makes writing high-quality tests easier and now running the tests is even easier using intern-cli. This package provides an intern command that has a POSIX-like interface, using familiar flags and options like –help. It follows some conventions that make running Intern simpler, and provides plenty of inline help. It even makes getting started with Intern easier with a new init command.
FullStack is a large London JavaScript conference hosted at the Skills Matter CodeNode. The conference brings together an impressive line-up of speakers and workshops covering five tracks over three full days of festivities. We were invited to speak at FullStack, and also enjoyed many of the other sessions and met many great engineers.
In this installment of our series on building web applications, we look at the SitePen approach to solving challenges in web application development. We employ all of the solutions described in part 2 of the blog series. Additionally, we have some overarching principles we apply to our work.
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.
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.
Last fall, Mozilla announced its Mozilla Open Source Support program, specifically focused on supporting the Free & Open Source Software movement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I recently attended Nodevember, a two-day JavaScript conference down in Nashville, TN. My love for JavaScript motivated me to take my attendance a step further and volunteer.
In mid-October, I attended my first jQuery Foundation boarding meeting. In case you missed the news, we announced in early September that the Dojo Foundation and jQuery Foundation are merging.
I was recently invited to attend the Twitter Flight conference in San Francisco! While this conference is clearly focused around Twitter products, this year included mobile and data tracks which covered the Fabric mobile SDK and the GNIP enterprise API platform.
I had the pleasure of attending Connect-JS in Atlanta this past weekend and had a great time speaking, attending talks and meeting some very talented people. Connect-JS totes itself as being a low-cost, community conference that brings in recognized experts from around the world.
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.
Intern Recorder is a new Chrome Developer Tools extension that makes creating functional tests for Intern faster and easier. The Recorder automates test creation by recording your interactions with a page in Chrome and converting those interactions into a test file that can be downloaded and added to your Intern test suite.
Today, we’re very happy to announce the release of Intern 3! This newest version of Intern is a culmination of several months of effort to overhaul the primary portions of the test system in order to provide a more stable and robust platform for building future features and enhancements.
At the end of 2014, we looked ahead to determine where to focus SitePen’s open source efforts in the coming year.
Performance is a critical part of most applications. Research continually shows that good performance is essential for a good user experience. Reasonable load times, smooth animations, and responsive interaction gives user a sense of interaction and immersion, whereas slow load times frustrate users, and choppy animation and interaction quickly makes an experience awkward and disconcerting.
One of the primary motivations for creating Intern was to make support for continuous integration testing much easier to achieve with JavaScript-based application development. We recently converted the vast majority of the unit tests in Dojo core from DOH to Intern, in order to streamline the process of regression testing patches for Dojo 1.x.
We normally try to schedule new minor releases of Intern about once every four to six weeks, but when we are working on a major release, there will often be a larger than usual gap in the release cycle.
In October, 2014, I was coerced invited to deliver a talk at the first FullStack conference in London, a conference focused on Node.js, JavaScript and hackable electronics. The conference was an interesting cross-section of all things related to JavaScript.
Today we’re pleased to announce the release of Intern 2.2. Along with improvements to existing functionality and a few bug fixes, this release includes a new console-mode reporter that provides a more detailed view of the testing process and improved rendering of differences between objects.
At many conferences, the hallway track is more interesting than the track during presentations. It’s the serendipity of a small group of people interested in solving a similar problem that run into each other and just start talking through it that makes the hallway track the most interactive experience at most conferences.
Last month, we conducted a live webcast to provide an Introduction to Intern, SitePen’s open source testing framework.
In our recent post on dgrid and Dojo Nano, we showed a technique of using nested require statements in order to make use of optimized layers using the Dojo build system. As a refresher, a layer is Dojo’s terminology for a file that combines many JavaScript resources into a single file.
With Wednesday’s release of Dojo 1.8, there are many exciting improvements to check out! Our top goal for this release was to significantly improve the quality of Dojo’s documentation.
We have been providing JavaScript and Dojo support to freelancers, start-ups and Fortune 500 companies for nearly a decade.
You may have seen our recent blog entitled “AMD: The Definitive Source” which exhaustively explained Asynchronous Module Definition. AMD is a topic with significant technical nuances but the purpose of THIS article is to explain the value of AMD for your business.
So what is AMD? As web applications continue to grow more advanced and more heavily rely on JavaScript, there has been a growing movement towards using modules to organize code and dependencies. Modules give us a way to make clearly distinguished components and interfaces that can easily be loaded and connected to dependencies.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
SitePen is excited to announce that Dojo Toolkit has won 1st Runner Up in the 2011 Packt Open Source Award for Open Source JavaScript Libraries! Congratulations to all of our competitors- jQuery, RaphaelJS, Sencha (ExtJS), and YUI Library. It was an honor to compete with this elite group of libraries.
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.
Yep. You read that right. We said free. Not free as in you get a free keychain with purchase. Actually free- no purchase required. All you have to do is submit your question as a comment to our Facebook Note on this same topic.
The short answer: Yes, if it changes its strategy to one that embraces and augments the open web ecosystem, rather than continuing down the path of trying to compete with or replace it.
It was recently reported that Google Dumps Gears for HTML5. If true, with the investment Google has made in HTML5, Chrome, Chrome OS, and Chrome Frame, this is not surprising, but it does leave a potential short-term gap for offline application development.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Notice: We recommend reading our newer post on RQL. A new data querying tool for has been added to Dojo 1.2. JSONQuery is a new module intended to succeed and improve upon the JSONPath module introduced in Dojo 1.1.
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.
Non-trivial data often has structures that cannot be well-defined with normal linear, acyclic data descriptions. Data that consists of cycles, many-to-one relationships, and non-local references often requires custom strategies for serialization and transfer of the data over JSON. Dojo 1.2 has added support for JSON referencing with the dojox.json.ref module.
We’re pleased to announce the two latest projects from SitePen Labs: Paver and Persevere!
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.
Notice: We now recommend the DOH replacement, Intern. Read our posts about Intern for more information. Many Dojo developers are aware of the Dojo Objective Harness (DOH) that the Dojo Toolkit uses for unit testing. Many people, however, want to use DOH for testing their own code or even non-Dojo code that they have written.
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.
Brad Neuberg, of the Gears team, took a stab at defining the “Open Web”. We at SitePen are very strongly in favor of the Open Web concept, because it’s the Open Web that has gotten us what we have today and will ultimately lead us to the best “web of the future”.