Dojo from the Air

While I'm sitting here 35,000 feet above the Tasman I thought it'd be a good time to update you all on the goings on in the world of Dojo from my point of view.

1.1!

Dojo released 1.1 after a lot of hard work. The team worked really hard to get this release out, and it adds a lot of polish to 1.0 and a number of cool new features. Some quick snippets from me:

dojo.attr()

We now have a smooth & nice way to access attributes on DOM elements, normalising access much in the way dojo.style() does. And, just like dojo.style() can now, if you pass in an object as the name, it'll set a bunch of attributes for you in one go:

// get the current value of the "foo" attribute on a node
dojo.attr(dojo.byId("nodeId"), "foo");

// we can just pass the id:
dojo.attr("nodeId", "foo");

// use attr() to set the tab index
dojo.attr("nodeId", "tabindex", 3);

// set multiple values at once, including event handlers:
dojo.attr("buttonId", {
 "name": "myButton",
 "value": "123",
 "onclick": function(e){
     // an onclick handler connected via dojo.connect()
 }
});

api.dojotoolkit.org

Our API browser is back, newer and better. You can search and browse all the code in Dojo, see method arguments and examples, and dig into the code if necessary. And when you figure out a tip you can comment in the appropriate place to help others out. We think this is a fantastic addition, and I've been using it on a daily basis for a while now.

dojox.help

Not really part of 1.1, but happened about the same time. The talented Neil Roberts whipped up an awesome demo based on some suggestions from a dojo cookie. Basically it accesses the API site live and allows you to get method arguments and descriptions directly in Firebug. I often get some code semi-working and test and experiment using the Firebug console while I finalise it, so this is a real boon.

Let's have a go:

1. load this page in Firefox with Firebug enabled
2. in the Firebug console, type the following:
   • dojo.require("dojox.help.console") // loads the help infrastructure
   • dojo.attr // prints the method arguments for dojo.attr()
     
   • dojo.attr.help() // prints the method description, examples, etc
3. revel in its coolness, dig in if you're using trunk, or wait patiently for it to appear in 1.2

Summer of Code

On Monday the Summer of Code students for 2008 will be announced. Dojo received a huge pile of great applications, and we had a really hard time evaluating and ranking them. Unfortunately the funding isn't infinite and neither is our mentoring capacity, so we've chosen what we think is a pretty exciting mix of projects. More to follow next week after the announcements!

The coding exercise we set went down pretty well. I suspect many of the students spent a lot more time on it than we asked, but there are some damn cool demos in there, which I'll try to show off over the next few weeks. Next year we'll try something a little more focussed, but its actually fairly tricky to think up the right balance.

Anyway, time to land now. Better be off. :)

Prepping for the Summer of Code

So, it was announced today that Dojo will be part of the Google Summer of Code in 2008. w00t! For students, you get a modest amount of fortune (US$4500) and some degree of fame (TBA), and Dojo gets your nice shiny code. This is our third year and the second time I've been involved. Looking at the quality of some of the applications that didn't make it this year, I'm a little scared that we only just scraped in.

Since the programme was announced on 25 February, we've achieved quite a bit, so I thought I'd jot it down:

• Figured out who's organising it: me, since I volunteered again ;)
  
  
• Thought about what was good and bad from 2007 and 2006 and what we'd change
  
  
• Write up a pile of documentation:
  
• An overview of SoC and Dojo for mentors and students
  
• A FAQ for students about what we and they should expect
  
  
• Created our project ideas list - basically we need to list some projects we think are both interesting and achievable by a new student in a couple of months. This involved a huge brain dump from me, followed by trying to herd our contributors into reviewing it and adding their own ideas, notes, and corrections. We've got some pretty good stuff down, but I know there's more great ideas out there still.
  
  
• Posted to the blog and our mailing lists looking for mentors and more ideas. We're trying to get 2 mentors per student this year, with one from the "core" Dojo team and someone else from the Dojo community who wants to get more involved - we have a lot of smart & talented people and we want to pull them closer.
  
  
• Answered a pile of emails, forum posts, IRC, and IM conversations with students and potential mentors.
  
  
• Wrote our application to Google. Only 175 out of 505 organisations have been accepted, so it needed to be good.
  
  
• Wrote a coding test - shamelessly ripping off the idea from my good friends at SilverStripe we decided that our students should do something practical as part of their application too. Still some more tweaking to do there too.
  

That took until this morning. Phew. What's next?

• Start matching enquiries to mentors
• Hassle some more of the core committers to get involved
  
• Figure out how we're going to deal with version control & ticketing for the SoC projects
  
• Sketch out our mentor 'teams' and fill in any gaps
  
• Decide how many projects we can handle
• Keep on top of the emails and other enquiries

Student applications start flowing in on the 24th, then they need to be reviewed and voted on by the 11th. Then I can relax for a bit (unless I end up mentoring a project as well) and just make sure everyone is communicating and making progress. Until evaluation-time.