OStatic

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.

Yahoo announced yesterday that it was releasing version 2.6 of its popular Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library, a collection of JavaScript objects and functions for client-side Web programming. YUI, distributed under the BSD license, is similar to such open-source JavaScript libraries as jQuery (see related story), Dojo, and Prototype/Scriptaculous. Note that this release is not the same as YUI 3.0, a preview of which was released earlier this year, and which will not be backward compatible with version 2.x.

Development of YUI 3.0, the latest version of Yahoo's User Interface toolset and widgets for Web development, is now available as a preview release. YUI has long been a popular choice for client-side Web development, both because of its liberal BSD license, and because of the number of features that the library includes. YUI 3.0, when it is released, will offer a variety of new JavaScript classes and widgets. However, this will come at a price, namely compatibility with YUI 2.x APIs.

Want to learn a new programming language or development framework? Books, magazines, and blogs are excellent -- but a growing number of people are also learning from screencasts, tutorials that combine someone's voice with a video of their computer screen. You can watch the teacher develop in real time, describing the actions that he or she is taking while they take place. There are many screencasts for open-source languages and frameworks, many for free and some for a nominal fee. Screencasts are playing a growing role in my attempt to keep up with new technologies, and you might well find them useful, too.

Prototype makes it easy for developers to work with HTML forms, asynchronous Ajax requests, and create and manipulate HTML elements. However, Prototype is a bare-bones library, providing none of the widgets or special effects that are included in many competing open-source JavaScript libraries, such as Dojo and YUI. It should not come as a surprise, then, to find that developers have stepped in to fill this void, creating a number of libraries that sit on top of Prototype and/or Script.aculo.us. There are several libraries that make it possible to draw graphs and charts within the browser window using JavaScript; this week, Deensoft announced the pending availability of their graphing library for Prototype, known as ProtoChart.

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.