Pythoneer

For the second time Django enthusiasts are meeting in Berlin on Wednesday, the 15th April, 2009 at 19:30. Find all the details here. And since I will be in Berlin this time, I just simply redeclare this to “Django/Dojo Stammtisch” instead of just “Django Stammtisch” :-). I hope all the djangoers are ok with that (I requested permission in #django-de). It just makes things easier to also meet some dojo people in Berlin. I will also have some cool new dojango stuff to show off!
So if AJAX, JavaScript and Dojo people are around, it would be cool to meet you there and chat about what’s hot and how the beer is. Please add yourself to the attendees list on doodle. And thanks again to the Berlin djangoers for organizing this, I am looking forward to it.

I cross-posted this from the uxebu blog, please go there to comment on it.

I am pretty excited, that we at uxebu got it managed to organize a dojo workshop with two of the dojo gurus. Actually it was Dylan’s idea, since he is doing a world trip and he suggested to have a workshop in Munich, since he is staying around for a while. It will be on the 7th and 8th of May 2009, and right after the next dojo.beer will take place, but that will still be announced separatly. First comes the dojo.wine this weekend and then … I am really excited about the next weeks.

So if you want to learn more JavaScript and especially dojo you should really come and join us at the workshop. Get your seat soon to still get one.
uxebu & SitePen - Dojo training in Europe, May 7th/8th

Together with Mayflower, we from uxebu are organizing the next dojo-event, this time it’s dojo.wine().
This time it will be in the Mayflower office in Würzburg (Germany) and we hope to see all people interested in JavaScript, AJAX and all the modern web stuff there.
As you can see in the following video we were a good number of people and had nice food!

dojo.beer(2) from Tobias von Klipstein on Vimeo.

We from uxebu have organized the second dojo.beer and are happy to have won Mayflower to jump in sponsoring the location here in Munich, Germany. On friday the 5th december we will warm up with some dinner and some beer in some place here in Munich. The real thing will be on the 6th at the Mayflower office, doors will be opened at 12:00 and we are hoping for a lot of talks from various people, to see how the are using dojo and we are also hoping to have interesting talks providing some useful input and may be even new stuff to learn. Bring your laptop and let’s hack away. If you have something special you need to have solved there will be someone who can help, for sure. From beginners to experts everyone is welcome. You don’t know nothing about dojo yet, but are interested you are right at the dojo.beer. You are a long time dojo user and want to dive into the depths of dojo, you are also perfect at the dojo.beer. So let’s have a great time and join us at the dojo.beer().

Some selected topics will (hopefully) be: functional programming with dojo, i18n, dojango, dojo build, dojo+Adobe AIR, deft - the dojo experimental flex technology, dojo and Zend Framework and many more.

Find all the details here dojo.beer.mixxt.de.

Make sure your Laptop doesn’t feel naked! You want a dojo sticker? Let’s meet at the next dojo.beer() and you will get one for sure! But please, don’t torture your Laptop by not having one.
The picture was taken at lunch at the AIA 2008, which was a great event. We had a lot of fun and besides evangelizing for dojo we from uxebu tried to promote our AJAX+JavaScript services, hopefully successful.

Finally we have released dojango. Well, to be honest it’s mostly Tobi’s work that dojango rocks as it does! Big thanks!
So if you are still looking for the right JavaScript toolkit to go with django then you are at the end of your search now. Use dojango! Dojango s

• a reusable django app that provides dojo
• easy dojo setup inside django
• build an optimized dojo
• some helper functions, i.e. JSON conversion
• switch easily between different dojo versions.

You find the project homepage right here.

Fortunately Tobias found out one day before that Adobe was touring with Air and coming to Munich. Adobe really had provided everything, from breakfast, drinks, lunch too I guess (we weren’t there) and beer afterwards (that we didn’t miss). It was really impressive. The talks were very Air focused, I liked the first one best, which gave an overview of what Adobe does and plans to do. One of the notable things was to see VoIP running inside a flash client, pretty nice. The Air stuff was just nothing too new and I see the main focus of using Air in running JavaScript+HTML apps inside it, so I was actually more interested in what is different to web apps in this concern. And Dion held a very nice overview talk about his employer’s latest product AppEngine, which was very interesting to see too, since I am a django addict too.
But anyways, besides my personal interests, I think Adobe had arranged a great event and the sessions had been very well received. Congrats Adobe. it was fun.
The best part for me was meeting with Dion Almaer the Ajaxian man, finally getting to know the person behind the voice, since I am an avid podcast listener I have heard all of the ajaxian podcasts too. If you ever have him near go and talk to him, a very nice person!
It was also nice talking to Andreas Ecker project lead of qooxdoo, he showed me what will be coming next in their new version. But you know, I am already married ;-). Even more interesting because we had been colleagues for a while last year.
And Adrian Ludwig from Adobe stopped me when he saw the “dojo” on my shirt and we talked some dojo+Air. Adobe is very interested in staying in touch with the AJAX community. It just simply seems that the Flash guys are coming across Air anyways, but the other potential users are all the AJAX devs. So I hooked him up with Nikolai right away, who I knew had been creating the nice Air demo over at dojocampus.

The plan for May 31st, 2008 is

15:00 meet at Weltzeituhr, as mentioned on upcoming, more info and a pic see here. When you are on Alexanderplatz you should find this clock pretty quickly.

19:00 - 22:00 we will be in Las Olas
and afterwards go to some bar, club, whatever we find, if you didn’t make it to join us until 22:00 your chances are only to search all of Berlin’s nightlife. Or catch one of us in the IRC channel #dojo before and get a mobile phone number (our nicks are klipstein, nonken, mccain).

And I will have a couple of T-Shirts with me, so be prepared to get undressed

see you

Yeah, this is really really good news, for both worlds. I was following Zend Framework loosely but from a lot of friends in this scene I have heard that it is the rising star and quasi industry standard of PHP frameworks. And now the logical next step to join forces with dojo is just right. For those that have doubts, you can use any other JavaScript toolkit with it too, but why would you want :-).
Looking forward into the great future of server and client interaction!

If you are around Berlin May 31st 2008 (as already mentioned a couple of times), consider joining us dojo folks form Europe to just informally get together and chat about the latest and greatest while discovering Berlin and it’s nightlife (the upcoming link). And if you want to be well dressed, we can help you too!

The shirts are available with the Berlin-specific back-side, which says

dojo.meetup(
    "Berlin",
    "May 31, 2008"
);
dojo.beer();

And we have checked it a couple of times, there should be no errors in there :-).

You can buy

• the Berlin version (with the back-side) for 19,99 Euro
• the standard version, just the dojo logo on the front for 16,99 Euro

The shirts are really good quality as the print is too! They will last for a while, you can be sure.
And don’t forget to be there, in Berlin! We are looking forward to seeing you.
For all those coming to Berlin, I will have a couple with me.

Actually the headline is not really what I want to say :-). But I don’t know any better yet.
I just want to write down how I solved sorting the following:

>>> var maxSpeed = {car:300, bike:60, motorbike:200, airplane:1000,
    helicopter:400, rocket:8*60*60}

This is a list of vehicles with their (approx.) max speeds. And now, I would like a list of the vehicles sorted by their max speed. This looks sooo easy, and actually it is :-). You just have to know how.
Look at this:

>>> var sortable = [];
>>> for (var vehicle in maxSpeed)
      sortable.push([vehicle, maxSpeed[vehicle]])
>>> sortable.sort(function(a, b) {return a[1] - b[1]})
[["bike", 60], ["motorbike", 200], ["car", 300],
["helicopter", 400], ["airplane", 1000], ["rocket", 28800]]

Since the sort function takes an extra argument, that allows to do your custom comparison we simply make sure that the right stuff gets compared, which is our speed. Unfortunately we can not sort the object directly, it has to be an array for doing so. But you can now convert it back, or just extract the vehicles, like so:

>>> dojo.require("dojox.lang.functional")
>>> vehiclesSortedBySpeed =
        dojox.lang.functional.map(sortable, function(i) {return i[0]})
["bike", "motorbike", "car", "helicopter", "airplane", "rocket"]

Didn’t I say it was easy?

Now there is already episode 2 out of the dojo podcast “from the guys” (I like when Pete says that).
There we are trying to discuss common topics, interesting things about and around dojo. If you want to join us, have comments, an interesting story to tell or alikes, just let us know and mail us at wolfram@dojotoolkit.org or contact us in the irc channel #dojo (just ping one of us: phiggins, nonken or mccain).
Have fun listening …

I have just seen that there are some nice things to get tackled in the summer of code, I am really looking forward to the results of what will become some nice extensions.
Especially the drag+drop form editor and the intuitive animations toolkit will be two things that will make dojo even more popular and easier to use.
All the best you guys and have a great summer …

dojo.explore("Berlin", "Saturday May 31, 2008 at 3pm");
dojo.beer();
dojo.dinner();
notTooTired = true;
while (notTooTired) {
    dojo.clubbing();
}

Stay updated via the upcoming event page.

There is a ton of helpful stuff in dojo and it is getting a lot better and more. Even the documentation is becoming better, so don’t hesitate to try it out! And there are some little pieces that you see coming every day that are being added to dojo to help.

There is for one the daily (if not hourly) progressing API viewer.
And there is the new dojox.help stuff.
And as a tiny little bit I also have added a piece (the apropos command) that probably gets added into the dojox.help namespace.

Stay on the pulse of dojo!

After reporting the mentioned bug to the Firefox guys they were not able to confirm it, and they are right!
It seems to be a Firebug bug!
Because if I do the same tests inline in the Firebug Lite console (not the Firefox extension in the browser!) everything works as expected.

>>> [] instanceof Array
true

I keep investigating

See Alex’s blog entry he posted the problem with Firefox3 beta3!
In short

>>> typeof []
"object"
>>> var a = [];
>>> var b = new Array();
>>> a.constructor == b.constructor
false
>>> c = [];
[]
>>> c.constructor == a.constructor
true
>>> d = new Array();
[]
>>> b.constructor == d.constructor;
true
>>> b.constructor == a.constructor;
false

After reading Eugene’s article about functional fun with dojo I wanted to play with dojox.lang.functional, and got stuck right away on one of the first calls.

>>> dojo.require("dojox.lang.functional")
>>> dojo.require("dojox.lang.functional.fold")
>>> df = dojox.lang.functional
>>> df.reduce([1,2,3], "+")
TypeError: a.hasNext is not a function

Oops, that was not what I expected, thanks to Alex’s help Firefox3 beta3 could be identified as the one who causes the problem. And I filed a bug there, so lets hope the next Firefox beta/version does it right.

[Update] The bug seems to be in FireBug, not in Firefox

Yesterday another one of my contributions found it’s way into dojo: dojox.widget.Rating. You can try out the always latest version online in the dojo archive. It’s quite a simple form widget, that allows you to click a star for rating an item. The number of stars and the styling can be adjusted via images and CSS.
If you want an even more flexible way to customize the stars you should look at what Tobi has to offer with his SVG generated stars, they come in many more flavors!

I know that already for a long time. And since using dojo I know it even better. And already for a couple of years I am always again coming across functional programming, but never got any deeper into it then using the basic things. But now there is a really juicy piece of fruit I will chew, thanks to Eugene Lazutkin who wrote this wonderful article on Functional JavaScript fun in Dojo. And he also describes what which JS version implements, and more important which browser provides what. Must read!
Thanks …

Ok, watch out for dojo accelerating and passing on the left … Shane O’Sullivan posted, already in december last year about the dojo demo engine. A great step forward and a way to document stuff much better, since you get examples and one tab further you see how it is coded.

It is still in development, but the future looks bright!
So, use all the resources you get …