Ajax Girl

A lot of news came together at the Dojo Developer Days event.

Below is my meta-roundup based on Alex’s wrapup, and other news.

Animation

Eugene Lazutkin (SitePen) has been a busy man. His impressive work on dojox.gfx, dojox.gfx3d, and dojox.charting made Dojo 1.0 the best tool around for portably drawing vector graphics in a browser without plugins, and for 1.1 he’s updating dojox.gfx to include animations, based loosely on easy-to-use Dojo Core animation APIs. Shapes, transformations, colors, and other dojox.gfx properties can be animated, chained, and eased on any 2D drawing object in Dojo 1.1, all using the high-performance, single-timer animation system from Dojo Core.

Speaking of animations, Peter Higgins gave us a tour of some of the great components he’s been whipping up now that Robert Penner’s awesome easing function set has landed under CLA in dojox.fx.easing. Of course, you can plug these great easing functions into any Dojo animation, but examples like dojo.moj.oe really give them life.

Adobe AIR and Dojo

Rob Christensen and another of his colleagues from Adobe were kind enough to give us a thorough walk-through of Adobe AIR as well as showing off Dojo 1.1’s comprehensive support for AIR. This work was done by SitePen and Chris Barber with financial support from Adobe. Not only does the Dojo package system work as expected in AIR, new dojox.storage providers for AIR give a simpler interface onto AIR’s database, including for encrypted data. The demo showing a full Dojo-based application inside of AIR for quickly taking notes started to show the potential.

More

• DojoX A/V: Starts as a way to embed flash and quicktime, but will also have a Jukebox and a Tuner. The bigger news here is that there is the beginnings of a partial port of some of the Dojo base to AS2 (including console pass-throughs, the event system (i.e. connect), and a number of the lang constructs) in order to support some of the A/V stuff well, all compiled using MTASC.
• CSS Selectors: a new tutorial on how to use dojo.query to get fast selection fun. Also, Dojo 1.1 already has a patch that uses the new WebKit native selectors
• Crypto: Blowfish now performs about 4 times faster than it used to
• Charting: curves… mmm
• DojoX Sketch: We reported about the Comet version
• Color: In addition to adding conversion methods to HSL, HSV, CMY and CMYK, there is a Generator that allows you to create a palette of colors based on several well-known generation rules
• Flash storage: Brad Neuberg started hacking and found that Adobe has fixed the serialization problems with Flash’s ExternalInterface, so a clean up is coming for dojox.flash, and Dojo Offline
• A next-gen JSON-RPC for Dojo which supports pluggable back-ends

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/233734512/dojo-roundup-av-animation-and-a-lot-more