I’ve been looking at using Phonegap and Dojo for rapid application development on mobile devices. As I have been doing blackberry development for the past year or so I thought that this would be a good platform to start on. However, I almost immediately ran into a problem with the WebWorks packager.
Back in 2007 I wrote a post on how to integrate Dojo with Greasemonkey.
Since then, Greasemonkey has been re-written to include security and bug fixes which has broken my demo code. The problem is that the new security model doesn’t return an instance to the newly created dijit.Dialog when the constructor is called. The work-around is to set the ID of the dialog, and then call dijit.byId() to get a handle to it.
Sometimes it can be handy to inject Dojo into pages that would not otherwise have it. I’ve used this so I can use dojo.query() on a page to select DOM objects while testing a parser in a different language.
I have been using the Dojo toolkit as my Javascript library of choice since back in early 2006 when it was still around version 0.4. Since then, the project has made tremendous strides including the release of version 1.0 and 1.1 with 1.2 on the way. At the beginning of 2008 I started using the Zend Framework to build MVC PHP applications and, with the release of 1.5, it has become my PHP framework of choice.
To my delight, the Zend Framework and Dojo have recently announced a partnership which will lead to tighter integration of these two great open source frameworks.
Recently I have been playing with the dojox.dtl: the javascript port of the Django templating engine. So far I am quite impressed, not only is it fast and full featured, but by writing a wrapper class it is easy to make it behave like server side templating systems: you specify a template and pass it an object and it will render that object according to the template rules.
For those of you who read about the re-launching of the SFU Bookswap website (http://sfubookswap.com), you may remember that one of the new features was the integration of the Google Books database.
In this entry I am going to talk about how I integrated the Google Book Search functionality into my existing Dojo framework.
Dojo (http://dojotoolkit.org/) is a wonderful javascript toolkit which just reached version 1.0 at the beginning of November. I have been watching and developing with Dojo for a couple years now and I can’t tell you how excited I am to have passed the version 1 milestone
Greasemonkey (http://www.greasespot.net/) is a handy Firefox extension which allows the injection of javascript (called userscripts) into the webpage currently being viewed. This allows for the customization of the look and feel of a website: improving the user interface or adding additional functionality.
In this example, we are going to use greasemonkey and Dojo to display a dialog widget on an arbitrary website.