The new Comet Daily blog (to which I will be a contributor) is finally live, and already they are doing a better job than I ever have at explaining the value of Comet for building low-latency interactions. Greg Wilkins has an excellent post outlining the load and latency benefits of going with a Comet server vs. traditional polling.
Michael Carter (of Orbited) walks us through the details of getting the beautiful htmlfile hack to work. This is new and novel information which is useful to all implementers of Comet clients and servers, so hats off to him on his sleuthing and persistence.
Lastly, Joe Walker leads off with as post that does one of the clearest jobs of explaining why Comet is inevitable that I've seen.
As you may have seen other places, Dojo 1.0 was released yesterday. Most reports on IRC and on the forums indicate that the transition for 0.9-based apps has been smooth sailing. I anticipate we'll be following up with 1.0.1 very shortly as we tamp down the issues that inevitably come up with such a large release, but so far so good.
Following up shortly on the heels of the release, Dylan screen shots of Dojo charting running on the iPhone. It's a testament to the architecture that Eugene and Kun put together for dojox.gfx that Chris Mitchell's awesome canvas renderer was able to slot right in to make this possible. For anyone counting, that now makes 4 independent renderers for the awesome shape-oriented GFX API: SVG, canvas, VML, and Silverlight. Portable, non-proprietary 2D graphics in a browser are really here.
Just hours after that, James Burke announced that 1.0 is available on AOL's CDN, meaning that you don't even have to download 1.0 to try it out. Just point to the right URL to include Dojo and you're up-and-running. Sweet.
Bryan Forbes jumped in with a beautiful Grid example today, and he tells me that it's going to be a recurring feature over on the SitePen blog which you'll also be able to catch over on Planet Dojo.
We've got more up our sleeves, and I can't wait to start talking more about the awesome features we've been busy baking into 1.0. Dojo is finally more than the sum of its well-designed parts. The team that put this release out made a huge gamble in January of this year, and 1.0 is proof that it has more than paid off. One of the major decisions was to ensure that dojo.js could be used on a stand-alone basis much the way other libraries tend to be. The result is a single file which is a tiny 23K on the wire, edge cached, and packed with all the utilities you're really going to need for "low level" Ajax. We haven't seen too many people using it stand-alone yet, but I expect to see a lot more of that soon. dojo.js is amazing infrastructure for progressive enhancement all by itself. From animations that handle colors to JSON support baked in to amazingly robust event normalization, dojo.js is industrial-strength plumbing and Dijit and DojoX are taking full use of it.
The next six months are going to be exciting.
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