I remember a time where it was hard to get content out of the Dojo crew :) Times have changed, the community is a lot bigger, and now we get to see a ton of content. Sometimes the irony behind this is that when you see a lot, you don't want to overwhelm people so you pass on stuff that you would have posted in the past.

To rectify this a little, here is a bit of a roundup on some of the interesting news from Dojo land in recent weeks:

JSON Schema in Dojo

With the rich JavaScript library ecosystem, it can be extremely difficult to make informed decisions when choosing which libraries to use for your own projects. Because no one has time to analyze each library in detail themselves, such decisions are usually made by getting a feel for what the “street” thinks and making the safe choice. Unfortunately, sometimes the word on the street doesn’t map to reality as the echo chamber arrives at a false consensus.

Bill Higgins of IBM Rational has written up some thoughts on componentization and packaging for Ajax applications based on work that his team did on the Rational Jazz platform.

Some of what he built was:

James Burke gave a great presentation in Boston on the Dojo build system, and how he is able to get the core down to 5.5k.

Pete Higgins released Dojo 1.2 the first version under his command. There are a ton of subtle improvements such as:

New Datastores

Blaine Ehrhart wrote a fun little fish tank using Dojo, as another example of doing animation using JavaScript, which includes the following to give you a taste:

The Dojo team has put out the much anticipated release candidate for the Dojo Toolkit 1.2. Lots of work has gone into this with new updates and features galore added to this release:

Matthew Russell is blogging and screencasting work from Dojo: The Definitive Guide and has put together a piece on a simple, degradable reflection widget using dojo.gfx:

SitePen continues their work on Deft with a multi-file uploader:

WaveMaker Studio 4.0 the Ajax based visual development platform for creating web applications has been released. Version 4.0 includes a new look and feel, usability improvements, and a host of new features.

Building applications has been made easier by a syntax highlighting code editor, improved widget drag and drop, undo, simplified data binding, more flexible css styling, and numerous usability tweaks.