Hello Everyone (users of dojotoolkit.org),

I'd like to take a second to ask openly everyone's opinion on what needs done. Not in the regard of Toolkit bugs or enhancements (you should be doing that at trac ;) ), but more what can be done in this website to better help you find the things you are looking for. As a new user (or old member), what has bugged you the most about navigating this site? Were you able to find everything in a sane manner?

Today I had the good fortune to run into some of the folks from the MapQuest team on the SxSW tradeshow floor. For some months now they've had a beta version of their service online which has made extensive use of Dojo and DWR (our sister Dojo Foundation project) to improve the user experience of the world's largest mapping service.

A couple of days ago the DrProject team sent mail asking about how to optimize their use of Dojo, and luckily the solution was easily at hand. By using the build system the DrProject team was able to speed up their load times by 300% and drop the number of requests from 35 to 4.

As a user of Plaxo, I've been delighted with their Pulse service for a while now. Bloglines is a really great start at letting me keep up with things, but Pulse fills an important gap where Bloglines leaves off. Why do I trust my personal data to a service like this?

DojoToolkit.org Request for Comments

The new website has been online for a while now. Not too terribly long, but long enough for users to form an opinion about it. We'd like to know what those opinions are, and this post is exactly where we'd like to see them. You all know that we start using Drupal for our website since it provides a fully featured Content Management System that is just oozing with features and modules that are capable of providing our users with a better experience when browsing DojoToolkit.org.

We are proud to announce the beta release of the Dojo Offline Toolkit. Dojo Offline is a free, open source toolkit that makes it easy for web applications to work offline. It consists of two pieces: a JavaScript library bundled with your web page and a small (~300K) cross-platform, cross-browser download that helps to cache your web application's user-interface for use offline. This is an early-access program, so there are a few bugs, but we have made tremendous progress - it's time to get the beta out the door.

IBM will be hosting a Dojo developer event in New York City on May 4th and 5th. This will be a great opportunity to go over the many exciting changes coming in the 0.9 release, gather feedback from the community, and even write some code while we're there. We are conducting contributor business the first day so we can dedicate an entire day on Saturday to our users. The agenda is still in the works -- please post if you have suggestions! RSVP to rsvp@dojotoolkit.org

DDD/NY
May 4th - Dojo contributors meeting
May 5th - Dojo community day
IBM Building, Room 1219
590 Madison Avenue (between 56th and 57th Sts)
New York, NY
IRC: irc.freenode.net #dojo

I'm happy to announce the first and hopefully last release candidate (zip) for Dojo 0.4.2. As usual, you can grab your favorite builds from download.dojotoolkit.org. 0.4.2 is a minor patch release to address the most severe issues and regressions in 0.4.1. Unlike 0.4.1, there are few if any new features.

At Dojo 3D2 this weekend, I announced that IBM's Ajax for WebSphere Platform is now available on the Early Adopter program website. This initial release includes Dojo Toolkit 0.4.1 as well as a comet implementation for WebSphere Platform Messaging (v6.0), and three end-to-end sample applications that illustrate how Dojo can be incorportated into J2EE applications running on existing WebSphere platforms.

The Dojo Community Resouces project has not been forgotten! Lately there have been many comments to the mailing lists regarding my last article requesting input on a Dojo Community Resource website. Well it hasn't been forgotten.