The day started as planned with coffee and snacks and a Dojo introduction giving everybody who wasn’t really familiar with the Dojo Toolkit a better idea of what it actually is. A few demos such as xRay where shown to show some of the advanced features of Dojo such as live charting, custom themeing and much more.
After a short break we continued with a talk on how to design mobile architectures with the Dojo Toolkit for platforms such as PhoneGap, W3C widgets and other mobile platforms supporting JavaScript/HTML and CSS. This is a very interesting topic and it was great to share the experience we made at uxebu on finding viable solutions for the challenges we face. The third talk was a quick overview of the current documentation efforts for Dojo and different ways of finding the information you need when you are stuck or simply looking for API docs or similar.
Before the break, Tomer Mahlin from IBM in Jerusalem, who is working on the BIDI implementation in Dojo, gave a very interesting talk on the challenges, developers face when writing applications supporting BIDI. Not having to deal with the issues you get confronted with when having to develop BIDI applications, this talk was eye opening and very interesting.
After a great lunch we jumped into a hands on session building a very simple mobile app running on both PhoneGap and devices with a widget runtime supporting W3C widgets installed. This gave the audience a glimpse into mobile development and the challenges but also really exciting features.

In total there were about 45 people attending the event which is an amazing amount of people for such a first time event, thanks again to everyone attending and especially to Yoav Rubin and the folks at IBM to make this happen.

I am already looking forward to the next Dojo event in Israel and hope that we can be part of it again.

Following are the slides to give you a little impression of the events content.

Taking this as an opportunity we want to announce the next dojo.beer() in Barcelona on June 17th.
You can get all info about the event on the DojoCampus event site.

The day after, we are speaking at the Mobile2.0 developer day and will give a detailed introduction in how to write mobile applications using the Dojo Toolkit and making sure they are running on different platforms such as PhoneGap and the W3C widgets being supported by Vodafone.

If you are in Barcelona that week, feel free to get in touch and if you have time to join for drinks during the dojo.beer or the mobile 2.0 conference let us know. Please sign up using the poll below.

Para los españoles :-)

Como Wolfram ha escrito en su último artículo de blog, nosotros estamos muy involucrados en el mundo de los móviles y estamos especialmente investigando como desarollar de la mejor manera para dispositivos móviles con Dojo.

Aprovechamos esta oportunidad para anunciar el próximo dojo.beer() en Barcelona el 17 de junio de 2009.
Puedes encontrar toda la información en inglés sobre el evento en la página de eventos de DojoCampus.

Al día siguiente vamos a dar una ponencia en el Mobile2.0 developer day y vamos a explicar como escribir aplicaciones moviles usando el Dojo Toolit y como asegurarse de que funcionan en múltiples plataformas como PhoneGap y como W3C Widget apoyado por Vodafone entre otros.

Si estás en Barcelona durante esa semana y te apetece contactar con nosotros no dudes en venir a tomar una copa al dojo.beer o a la conferencia mobile2.0. Por favor participa en el poll abajo si quieres ir.

In cooperation with Mayflower we invite every Dojo enthusiast, JavaScript developer, and anyone else interested in the web to join a day of good food, wine and of course lots of development talk.

If you want more information, visit the dojo.beer() wikipages. You will find addresses, schedules and everything else you need to know about the next dojo.wine().

If you are planning to come, please fill in your name into the attendees list, so we can plan for the day, organize the food and drinks (We don’t want to end up with too little food or drinks ;) ).

Looking forward to seeing you in Würzburg, if you have questions drop us an email or visit us in the Dojo channel (#dojo) at irc.freenode.net.

dojo.beer(2)

In the evening of 5th December we’ve had our start for the dojo.beer(2) event in a nice bar in Munich, where about 10 Dojo enthusiasts attended to prepare for the official event the next day. During the evening Wolfram placed the bet, that more than 30 people will attend during the official dojo.beer(2) event. I lost that bet, because 32 people attended and I was really excited (still am), that so many people were interested in Dojo.

The next day we welcomed all attendees with a typical Bavarian Weisswurst. After the first meet and greet Wolfram collected Dojo topics people could talk about and everyone voted on those, followed by Nikolai, who gave a great overview of the most important Dojo components.
Then it was time for our special guests Dylan Schiemann and Pete Higgins who joined us via video chat and we talked about the current status of Dojo (just before that moment Dojo Version 1.2.3 was released) and what is planned for the future. Afterwards it was my job to explain the Dojo build system and how you can optimize a Dojo driven website (slides below). My talk was followed by Wolfram, who explained several Dojo features and later dived into the functional programming capabilities of Dojo (for further info, see the post of Shane O’Sullivan and for deeper insight a blog entry by Eugene Latzutkin). Nikolai then introduced Dojos new user documentation and gave a short preview of the new Dojo website. The last lecture was given by Norman Wenk (acomo), who demonstrated the Dojo widget system and explained the pitfalls, when creating your own. After a full day of Dojoness we went to a bar and ended with several dojo.beer(s).

dojo.beer(2) from Tobias von Klipstein on Vimeo.

Thanks to everyone who attended this event and I hope everyone enjoined it. I would particularly like to thank Mayflower who donated their office for that event and also like to note, that we wouldn’t had this amazing event without their support. Many Many Thanks!!!

More info about that event:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=dojo.beer
http://your-bear.blogspot.com/2008/12/djbeer-in-munich.html
http://blog.thinkphp.de/archives/375-dojo.beer2.html
http://higginsforpresident.net/2008/12/back-in-business/

Webmontag Munich

On Monday, 8th December 2008, Wolfram and I went to the Webmontag event in Munich where Mihai Corlan, Platform Evangelist of Adobe, gave a good insight into technologies like Flex, Air and Zend AMF. Afterwards I’ve got the possibility to give an overview of Dojo, where I showed how Dojo evolved during the last year. At the end I showed some videos about Wavemaker, IBM’s Project Zero and the nice training application of Sitepen called Sensei to give an impression what you can reach with the Dojo Toolkit today.

I really enjoyed the round-table discussion about open source, the open web and how companies like Adobe fit in. Thanks to the Munich PHP-UG, Flex-UG and of course Raju Bitter, who altogether organized this nice event.

A Sidenote:

Mihai showed some interesting slides about a comparison James Ward made with his Census application. He shows the speed improvements of AMF in favour of JSON communication when transferring 5000 rows and more. This is a very special use case, I rather see the latest usability and interaction patterns stearing into the direction of loading just the data on demand that are really required. In most cases this big number of data is also hard for users to grasp. There is charting and some visual presentations that might require this load of data, but the optimization on the server will probably serve a better user experience here. An interesting read is Jared Jurkiewicz blog article about comparing these numbers with Dojo today, as the comparison of James Ward was made in April 2007.

If you are interested in the Dojo Toolkit, JavaScript and web-development, you are welcome to join.
We will have a diverse program with several talks, dojo.food() and dojo.beer().

During our Saturday session we are welcoming two special guests which are rooted very deeply in the Dojo development, we won’t tell who it is, if you are curious, be there Saturday at noon ;) and don’t miss the dojo.beer() on Friday.

You can find the exact schedule here.

Until Friday and Saturday

The main event will be held Saturday, December 6th at the office of Mayflower in Munich, they were so kind and will allow to use their conference room so we can have a few Dojo talks and exchange know-how.

For the ones who can make it on Friday already, please join us for a few dojo.beers() in Munich.

The exact schedule will be posted on DojoCampus.org.

If you are planning to attend please drop a mail to rsvp {at} dojotoolkit.org or let us know in #dojo at irc.freenode.net, you can leave a comment here as well.