Three days ago on Sunday, we – the uxebu team (Wolfram Kriesing, Tobias von Klipstein and Nikolai Onken) – came back from Boston, where we had spent an awesome week with the Dojo folks at the Dojo developer day (DDD) and later at the Ajax Experience 2008.
We had rented an apartment together with Peter Higgins (SitePen, Dojo Lead) and stayed there from September 26th until October 4th.

Right the first night we all had to prove that we are worth staying and after the flight and 6h timezone difference we went to the bar right next door until late at night. No further help was needed to fall asleep :-).

On Sunday we spent all day at the Dojo developer day at IBM with a lot of the Dojo developers. It was amazing to feel the energy in this room, everybody had the same goal – pushing Dojo. There were breakout sessions discussing the documentation, the foundation website and roadmaps for future Dojo releases.

We are especially happy that uxebu is providing the new documentation system for Dojo, which Tobias has implemented by using a customisation of the moinmoin wiki and sphinx. Once the system is feature complete it will include integrated Dojo examples, svn control, distribution to remote servers and export to any kind of format, such as HTML, PDF, etc. A sneak preview of the documentation sandbox can be found at docs.dojocampus.org.

As on Saturday, we also went to a restaurant on Sunday. Funny was the fact that the jQuery guys showed up later in the same restaurant, they obviously had met in the MIT, which was close by.

Monday started off with the community day of the Ajax Experience where Dojo, jQuery and Prototype spent the first half of the day introducing themselves and showcasing their latest features (its amazing how much we have in common). Nikolai gave a great talk about the new features of dijit.layout in the latest Dojo release (1.2). Besides Pete Higgins, who did a great job hosting most of the dojo show, other talks were given by Dylan Schiemann (SitePen), Tom Trenka (SitePen), Matthew Russel (Author, Dojo the Definitive Guide), James Burke (AOL), Jayant Sai (ESRI – an amazing mapping application), Chris Mitchell (IBM), and Bob Buffone (Nexaweb – dojo.cast() interview will be released soon on DojoCampus.org)

Later during the community talk given by Pete Higgins and Nikolai, Nikolai officially got announced as Dojo’s Community Evangelist, this is great news.

After that, the Ajax Experience officially kicked off with a series of talks all focused on Ajax (yep ;) ) and related technology. We had some very interesting discussions with various people. The talks at the conference that really stood out were the security talk by Joe Walker, the performance talk from Steve Souders and Chris Zyp’s very forward looking JSON talk.

Until Wednesday all days were packed with Ajax Experience, which meant simply hacking all day, either sitting in a session, sometimes listening to the talk, sometimes just hooking in, to get power (we’re still waiting for a 48h laptop battery). At night we went to dinners with the Dojo and SitePen folks and afterwards, when we had returned back to our small town – Quincy, South of Boston – we had a few drinks in our local bar right next to our apartment.

An interesting concept we found when driving into Boston early in the morning were the so called HOV lanes (high occupancy vehicle lane) – they don’t exist in Europe =/ – those are build up early in the morning and are only reserved for cars with more than two people in them, great idea!. We couldn’t believe that those lanes were gone by noon.

The last two days Thursday and Friday we actually used to … surpise … hack :-). Granted, we went shopping a little bit, but just for a couple of hours. Pete and Tobias made a pretty cool demo “Create your own dojo developer” which mixes different faces together to “create” a new face. All the faces initially were the pictures of Dojo developers, but at the TAE all kinds of people made it into the demo with their picture.

On Thursday Nikolai started pushing on one of the prototypes of a pretty cool application that we (uxebu) have just started to implement a week before. Within a day we came to see some pretty cool results and those opened up a whole bunch of new ideas on how this application will be of great benefit to many other client side developers. Stay tuned and watch out for the official release of the application at the Ajax in Action in Mainz. One little teaser… it’s name is xRay.

After an exciting week and after a little walk around South Boston, where nothing is happening on a Saturday (this seems to be the financial district), we got back on the plane(s) to Amsterdam and Munich on Saturday evening.

This week leaves us with a lot of ambition and energy, we are looking forward to the xRay release and the official launch of our website and services section.

Uh, and by the way, when boarding the plain to Boston, we were jokingly saying that we only went there to eat burgers, except for two or three days we did pretty good :-). So all goals were met!

If you haven’t yet seen the new 1.2 release, go and take a look at http://dojotoolkit.org/2008/10/06/dojo-1-2-so-much-sliced-bread, its an amazing release, and we happily looked over Pete’s shoulder while he was packing it up! Go Dojo go …

SitePen has posted a few pictures, more will be released on DojoToolkit.com soon.