Dojo, one of the leading open-source libraries and widget sets for JavaScript programming, released its latest version (1.2) yesterday. Dojo, which is developed by the Dojo Foundation and released under both the BSD License and Academic Free License, is officially integrated with a number of Web development frameworks, such as Django and the Zend Framework, and by vendors such as IBM and Sun Microsystems.

The Zend Framework, a popular open-source Web application framework sponsored by PHP company Zend, just released version 1.6, and it contains a large number of new features. So writes Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans on his blog last week, on the occasion of the release being made available. The most important features associated with this release are the integration of the Dojo framework for JavaScript, better support for automatic testing, and better support for SOAP.

Client-side Web developers work mainly in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, displaying and manipulating data within a Web browser, while retrieving and storing that data on the server. One exciting new entry on this front is SproutCore, a new JavaScript framework that brings a full model-view-controller (MVC) approach to client-side programming. SproutCore gained a great deal of public attention in the last week, since Apple announced that its new MobileMe (formerly .Mac) service uses it.