Adobe asks Ajaxians to beta test Apollo

Adobe wants to make Apollo a great environment for Ajax developers.

They were looking to find a bunch of smart JavaScript hackers in the know to get involved in a private Beta of Adobe Apollo, and realised that the Ajaxian community was a great place for them to reach out.

Therefore, if you have an interest in trying out Apollo, and giving honest feedback to the team at Adobe simply send an email to apollobeta@adobe.com with the following information:

  • Your name
  • Email address
  • Why you are interesting in Apollo

The Dojo Offline Toolkit

Brad Neuberg has started work on the Dojo Offline Toolkit backed by the generosity of SitePen.

What is the Dojo Offline Toolkit?

The Dojo Offline Toolkit will be a small, cross-platform, generic download that enables web applications to work offline.

Let’s look at the Dojo Offline Toolkit from a user’s perspective. Imagine Alex is using a web-based real estate application for realtors built with the Dojo Offline Toolkit. In the upper-right corner of this web application is a button that says “Work Offline.” The first time Alex clicks on this button, a small window appears informing him that this web application can be accessed and used even if he is offline. If Dojo Offline has never been installed, Alex is prompted to optionally install a small 100K through 300K download that is automatically selected for his appropriate OS, including Windows, Linux/x86, and Mac OS X/Universal Binary.

Once Dojo Offline is installed with the included installer, the web-based real estate application prompts Alex to drag a hyperlink to his desktop and bookmark the web application’s URL. As Alex works online, anything that should be available offline is simply stored locally. If Alex is offline, he can reach his application by simply double-clicking the link on his desktop, opening its bookmark, or by simply typing in its normal web address. The application’s user-interface will magically appear in the browser, even if the user is offline, and all offline data will be retrieved from and stored into local storage. Dojo Offline detects when the network has reappeared, allowing the web application to send any data stored in local storage to the web server.

Local storage is done using Dojo Storage, which allows web applications to store hundreds of K or megabytes of information inside the browser, with the user’s permission. Dojo Storage is complete and works across 95% of the existing installed base of the web, including Firefox, Safari, and Mozilla on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. The Dojo Offline Toolkit will come bundled with Dojo Storage.

Once Dojo Offline has been installed, it will work for any web application that codes to it — it is completely generic and has no application specific information in its download. Applications have a consistent, simple API they can code to, the Dojo Offline and Dojo Storage APIs, to enable offline ability. Even better, since the user always interacts with the web application through its domain name, rather than through a file:// URL or http://localhost domain name, the web application runs under the same security policies as standard web sites, which means a user’s machine will not be compromised by an untrusted web application. The Dojo Offline Toolkit will work in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, and will run on Windows, Linux/x86, and Mac OS X/Universal Binary.

The Dojo Offline Toolkit will be fully open source, available under the same licenses as Dojo: the BSD and the AFL.

The work is done via the Proxy AutoConfiguration (PAC) feature in our browsers, and the final deliverable will consist of:

  • the Dojo Offline proxy
  • installers and uninstallers
  • PAC file generation and registration
  • the Dojo Offline API for easy, application-level access
  • the Dojo Offline web-based installer UI for downloading Dojo Offline documentation
  • a sample application, Moxie, modified to work with Dojo Offline
  • QA and bug fixing

Good luck to Brad. We look forward to hear about your experience, and progress!

SWFUpload: Nice way of uploading your files

What it is?

Upload files via flash to get the flash-upload dialog goodness.

  • Only display chosen filetypes in dialog
  • Upload multiple files at once by ctrl/shift-selecting in dialog
  • Trigger javascript functions on start, cancel, progress and complete
  • Get file information/size before upload starts
  • Style upload buttons any way you want
  • Do progress-bars/information using valid XHTML and CSS
  • No page reloads, display uploaded files as they are finished
  • Works on all platforms/browsers that has Flash support.
  • Degrades gracefully to a normal html upload form if Flash or javascript isn’t available.

You can check it out more about if from here:
http://labb.dev.mammon.se/swfupload/

Dojo 0.4 Is Now Available

Available for download (Ajax build, others) The 0.4 release contains many exciting new features, a whopping 529 bugs closed, and the initial release of the long-awaited documentation tool, with inline API documentation that will continue to improve with follow-on releases. These improvements will make Dojo appealing to entirely new audiences and will bring Ajax applications to a new level of acceptance as a first-class user environment. Some of the highlights include:

  • dojo.a11y: the foundation for accessibility (a11y), implemented in some of Dojo’s widgets in 0.4 with more to follow in 0.5. Dojo strives to provide keyboard function as well as integration with high-contrast mode and screen readers for the visually impaired.
  • dojo.charting: A charting engine to implement a variety of chart types using vector graphics
  • dojo.gfx: a 2D vector graphics API which renders natively to browsers as SVG or VML
  • dojo.i18n: a follow on to the translation support in 0.3.1, there is now build support for collecting localized resources in a single file as well as support for localized date and time formatting. More formatting types and more localization to come in 0.5.
  • dojo.lfx: major improvements, such as chainable animations
  • dojo.namespaces: support for extensible widget namespaces and an automatic widget manifest loading feature.
  • dojo.widget: new widgets like Clock, FilteringTable, ProgressBar, plus enhancements to Editor2 and the AccordionContainer. Also localization of some widgets, such as DatePicker.
  • AOL’s contribution of a linker for Javascript, not yet integrated into the build.

30 Ajax Tutorials

Max Kiesler has put together a nice Round-up of 30 Ajax Tutorials in which he scoured the web to find the various tutorials on parts of Ajax out there.

AJAX Client-Server Communication Tutorials

AJAX Drag and Drop Tutorials

AJAX Form Tutorials

AJAX File Uploader Tutorial

AJAX Framework and Toolkit Tutorials

Ajax Getting Started Tutorial

Ajax Image Gallery Tutorial

Ajax Keyword Suggest Tutorials

AJAX Live Search Tutorials

Ajax Rounded Corner Tutorials

Ajax Sorting Tutorial

Ajax Tabbed Pages Tutorials