Dojo Developer Day, also known as DDD, was a great success this year!
On day one we started with a rundown of successes from 2007: massive refactoring of Dojo into a much smaller, faster system; major improvements to accessibility and internationalization in Dijit, the Dojo widget system; and exciting new features around the Dojo Grid, charting libraries, Dojo.Data, and Dojo Offline.
After reviewing 2007 (including finding out about three new Dojo books coming out soon!), we moved on to setting direction for 2008 and Dojo 1.1, the next release. Every team member gave short updates on where their package is at and where they are going. James Burke of AOL showed off his work on allowing multiple versions of Dojo to work on the same page, while Bill Keese of IBM, Torrey Rice of SitePen, and Nikolai Onken gave us the lowdown on Dijit 1.1 and their improvements to the Dijit themes and look. I'm the module maintainer for Dojo Offline, Dojo Storage, and Dojo Flash, so checked in on the status of these and future directions; expect to see Dojo Flash and the Flash Storage Provider working again with the Dojo 1.0 architecture and a new release of Dojo Offline in the near-future (post Dojo 1.1 on both however).
Adam Peller at IBM showed us the new BorderContainer layout model that makes it easier to construct layouts, while Dustin Machi at SitePen revealed the exciting work he is doing on the JSON-RPC system. Neil Roberts of SitePen has ported Django's templating language to JavaScript (!), doing some nifty things around the build system to make it easy to use while efficient in production, while Eugene Lazutkin of SitePen continues to amaze us all with his cross-browser Dojo graphics work and charting APIs. Eugene expressed interest in playing around with Google Gears to create 2D and 3D Gears modules to make this stuff easier and more powerful; jump on the Google Gears developer mailing list to join the discussion and coding.
I could go on and on; there were so many great checkins and exciting developments on just the first day that I can't list them all here; Alex Russell has an in-depth blog post that goes into the nitty-gritty of all the great work everyone did.
The rest of DDD day one and two were dedicated to demos of cool applications folks are building using Dojo, including a new version of AOL MailTM based on Dojo, and serious code hacking during the day to fix Dojo bugs. I spent much of the time during the hackathon refactoring Dojo Flash to work again (it regressed when we jumped from Dojo 0.4 to Dojo 0.9). It's always great to get to work face-to-face with all the names I see fly by on the Dojo mailing lists and Subversion checkins. Thanks to everyone for making DDD a success!
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