As promised this morning, I’ve made all of my materials for the 3 hour tutorial available under liberal licensing. All ~160 slides of them and accompanying code samples.

Also as promised, I removed the PHP dependencies for some of the server stuff and replaced it with a simple python server that uses cherrypy. You should hopefully have no problems getting the sample server to run. You should have no problems finding stuff on the net to help you get that setup if you have problems, but feel free to comment here as well. Additionally be sure to skim the README in there.

You can get the materials here.

Thanks again to everyone who attended. I hope that you were exposed to some of the great tools that Dojo can bring to the user experiences you are creating and that these slides are sufficiently succinct that they are a help to you. While they don’t cover everything in my book, they really do cover a lot of it…more than enough to get you pretty darn proficient.

Finally, remember that we’re having the dojo.beer() tomorrow here in San Jose at 7pm. Please don’t miss it.

Update: We have some interest, and I’ll advertise this event at my Dojo tutorial on Tuesday, so anyone who is interested should pencil in Wednesday, 22 July @ 7pm. Venue: O’Flaherty’s. From the map, it looks to be easily accessible from the conference.

Anyone want to get together for a dojo.beer() event at OSCON next week? Basically, a dojo.beer() event is just a little get together to talk some shop about what’s happening with Dojo, Ajax, the open web, etc. whilst refreshing oneself with dinner and a few beers in good company.

Any preferences for Wednesday, July 22 versus Thursday, July 23?

Recommendations for venue in the San Jose area?

Please, chime in below or throw out a holla to @dojotdg and/or @dojobeer.

Many months ago, I wrote an article for InsideRIA that provided a topical look at some of the more useful things that Dojo provides you entitled Dojo Tips and Tricks. I’d actually forgotten that I even wrote the article so it was a surprise when a colleague wrote me earlier this morning and mentioned it.

It’s a bit more diverse than some drive-by-tutorials in that it digs into DojoX just a little bit and mentions the build system, so even if you’ve been using some of the core tools for a while now, you may still learn a few things from a quick read.

In between the time when the article was finished and now, Dojo has since updated to version 1.3 so you’ll unfortunately see a few CDN URLs that point to version 1.2; however, upgrading the URLs shouldn’t break anything. The latest and greatest is usually a great place to start, so I always encourage folks to stay up to date.

If you’re coming to OSCON this summer, be sure to drop by my 3 hour tutorial for a closer look at many of the great tools that Dojo provides.

The latest, greatest copy of Linux Journal features a great primer I put together on Dojo’s really fab grid widget! The content was written a couple of months before the 1.3 release, but the code examples still work just fine with the latest version of 1.2. I start out by briefly introducing some dojo.data fundamentals and then show how the grid leverages these data APIs to do a lot of nifty things.

In early July, I’ll be allowed to reprint the article’s full content here under the terms of a free documentation license, and when that time comes, I’ll make sure it’s updated to work with the latest version of 1.3. In the meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the June edition of Linux Journal and make some time to get up close and personal with the grid widget.

If you’re coming out to OSCON this summer, be sure to drop in for my 3 hour Dojo tutorial that will add bit of kick to your web dev skills. I’ll lightly cover as much breadth as possible so that you have an appreciation for just how much is packed away in the toolkit, but we’ll certainly dig headfirst into especially interesting and fundamental areas of interest as well so that you have a firm grasp on those things you won’t want to live without.

If there are topics you’d like to see covered in particular, feel free to leave comments below, and I’ll do my best to make sure that they aren’t missed. Hope to see you there.

This is just a quick note for you twitterers out there: you can now follow dojotdg if that’s a more convenient way to keep up with new happenings than keeping an eye on your feed reader.

While we’re talking about Twitter, I might also add that you should take a moment to follow dojotoolkit if you’re not already doing so. Whereas dojotdg is who you’d follow for specific content that’s somehow related to my book and posted here on this blog, dojotoolkit is who you’d follow for “all things Dojo”. There’s potentially some overlap there, so follow both of us, and call it good.

Join me at the Big Nerd Ranch the first week of May for JavaScript/Ajax Bootcamp. Sure, there will be plenty of Dojo to go around, but we’ll also look at other technologies and toolkits throughout the course, so bring hard questions and interesting projects along with you. I’ll make sure you’re not disappointed and that you go back home with the knowledge you need to take care of business.

I’ve totally blocked off my schedule for the week I’m out at the ranch, so I’ll be completely available outside of the core teaching hours. Let’s get ready to do some serious immersion, work on interesting things after class, and have a great time.

If you’re attending the course, feel free let me know if there’s anything in particular that you’re especially interested in; given a little bit of lead time, I’ll do whatever I can to tweak the course content as long as we’re not getting too far out of scope.

My consulting firm has been spending a good bit of time augmenting and providing developer advice for a really interesting startup based out of Berkeley, CA called Life360; in case Life360 sounds familiar, it might be because they were one of the first place teams in Google’s Android Developer Challenge a while back. In short, the crew out in Berkeley is developing an incredible developer platform for “taking care of your family’s what-ifs”, and it’s been a lot of fun getting to be in on all of the discussions and working with the amazing talent on board there to see it happening.

One of the most recent tasks we’ve been working on is an iGoogle-like drag-and-drop container for gadgets. There’s a really nice project out there called Shindig that implements the gadget specification, but there’s little to be had in the way of a nice sophisticated container that gives you drag-and-drop operations, a custom title bar, and a maximized view. Well, after getting chunks of the new application platform wrapped up for some investment pitches in the coming weeks, we decided that it would be really cool to give some of this code back to the OSS community since we’ve benefited so much from Shindig, the LAMP stack, and a number of useful utilities here and there.

90 sec (6.4MB) QuickTime file of dnd in action across multiple browsers

4 min (13.5MB) QuickTime file of installing Shindig and using the container extensions

You can read the blog post on Life360.com for the details as well as watch some screencasts that walks you through downloading Shindig and putting the files to use, but I did want to take just a moment to make brief mention of a couple of the technical considerations that immediately come to mind:

• When doing anything like this, you need infrastructure. For this part of the project, Dojo streamlined tons of things like setting up event handlers, styling nodes, getting coordinates on the screen, abstracting a lightweight fabric for drag-and-drop operations, and so forth. Currently, the code uses AOL’s CDN to keep things nice and simple, but you’d definitely want to use the build tools to consolidate and minify the code when it’s game time.

• When an IFRAME is inserted into the DOM, it (re)loads. So, when you’re dragging an IFRAME all over the screen, its location in the DOM doesn’t change and it doesn’t continually reload because it’s just being positioned absolutely. It’s when the drag event ends that you’re faced with the reload event because you want to move it into its new column (versus trying to maintain the geometry of never manipulating the DOM tree and keeping track of everything in a snap-to-grid fashion.) Anyhow, that’s the approach we took. The one reload event that takes place when the gadget being drug reaches its final destination seemed more reasonable than all of that geometry. Other than the frame getting drug around, no other IFRAMES ever get removed and reinserted, so they never have to reload.

• For security reasons, Shindig renders gadgets inside of their own individual IFRAMEs versus rendering gadgets in an element like a DIV. That may not sound like a big deal, but it does bring up a few more implementation details worth noting. The first one that comes to mind is that when you’re dragging a DIV that contains an IFRAME, it’s not uncommon for the mouse to occasionally slide ever so slightly into the IFRAME. Unfortunately, the IFRAME then captures mouse events, and then drag-and-drop starts to get choppy and wig out a bit. You can work around this by creating a transparent overlay and placing it on top of the IFRAME during drag events so that the IFRAME can never capture those mouse events. Overlays also come in handy when you popup menus on the titlebar and want them to disappear when the user clicks anywhere else on the screen (including in other IFRAMEs.) One day, hopefully, Caja will kill those IFRAMEs, which will also probably help performance a bit (especially on IE.)

• There are a few peculiarities that arise when you remove the last element from a container like a DIV, so one way you can deal with this is to ensure it always has a minimum height and width by placing an element in there that spans the width of the column and has a minimal height so that it can accept drag events.

• As always, there are always a few special cases, so you have to do a little extra bookkeeping here and there. Hopefully the code is commented well enough that it’s not hard to follow. All in all, it’s only about 150 lines for the drag and drop mechanics, including whitespace.

Life360 would love to have you go take a look at their site and rate some of their ideas, so why not head on over there, browse around, and leave some feedback on what they’re doing. Helping startups that have good intentions is the cool thing to do, right?

I was really excited when I got the Feb 09 issue of Linux Journal in the mail yesterday, because they did such a fantastic on laying out the article I put together on gfx, a module for cross-browser 2D drawing. It’s a fairly meaty nine page tutorial, there’s a ton of code examples in it (each with accompanying images that show you what the code examples produce) and overall, it’s clear that they really put some thought into making it look so nice in print.

Per my contracts with Linux Journal, I’m allowed to republish articles I write under an OSS license 30 days after they’ve been on newsstands, so once that time elapses, I’ll republish it here, just like I did for Using Dojo: The JavaScript Toolkit with Industrial Strength Mojo. But seriously — don’t let that dissuage you from paying the six bucks to get this February issue. It’s packed with great articles on web dev, and is one of my favorite issues in a long time.