Changes for DWR

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 16:45:21 GMT

This is very good news for DWR and for Ajax on Java.

The short version is that DWR is now part of the Dojo Foundation and that I now work for SitePen. This means that I'll be working nearly full-time on DWR rather than spending part of my time stuck in a big enterprise with Word as my IDE churning out technical architecture documents.

There are a whole bunch of questions that I just know I'm going to get asked:

Does this mean that DWR is going to become part of Dojo?

No. DWR will remain totally independent. There are some bits that I'd quite like to steal (JS compression for example) but you won't need to use Dojo if you want to use DWR or the other way around.

What's going to happen to Getahead and the DWR website?

For some time you've been able to visit www.directwebremoting.org and get redirected to the DWR website. We'll be moving the DWR website over to Dojo Foundation infrastructure and making use of the new domain at the same time. I'll be keeping my blog at Getahead for now at least. Consulting deals that Getahead would have done in the past will now be done by SitePen.

Who are SitePen?

SitePen employ a bunch of cool hackers: Alex Russell and Dylan Schiemann and many other Dojo people, Kevin Dangoor (Turbo Gears), and many more. They offer support packages for Dojo and now DWR, but also develop complete solutions.

What's happened to the TIBCO deal?

It's not gone away. I'll still be working to enhance DWR's Reverse Ajax proxy APIs, which from the next version of DWR particularly should aid DWR/GI integration.

Kevin Hakman from TIBCO is quoted on the official press release:

"Development teams, both small and large, have quickly discovered the benefits of using DWR in conjunction with leading Ajax libraries like Dojo, TIBCO General Interface, Scriptaculous, and others. DWR joining the Dojo Foundation is a great win for the DWR community," said Kevin Hakman, director, TIBCO Software, Inc. who has been a corporate sponsor of DWR's development for more than a year. "The close alignment of these projects, and the anticipated integration points between them, will serve to further simplify creating Ajax applications for Java developers."

Top 5 features that browsers need

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 14:19:00 GMT

The following 5 things would really help developers to create better web applications.

1. Standard Libraries

We should take the core of Dojo or something similar and embed it in all browsers so it doesn't have to be downloaded on every web page. It should not be as big as full Dojo, and it should be stable.

2. Server Push

Comet is too hard. Reverse Ajax in DWR is one of the trickiest bits of code I've ever written. It should not be so hard.

3. Better Widgets

Menus, trees, sortable tables, tabs, draggable divs. The What-WG is working on some of them, but by no means all.

4. Vector Graphics

Microsoft? Have you got beyond "we're thinking about it?". Opera, Firefox and Safari/KHTML all have Canvas and SVG either in a full release or in CVS.

5. Local Storage

You can use cookies, or flash, or get an nice API from Dojo Storage, but we should have it in a native browser feature.

What did I miss?