Joe Lennon

Learn about Dojo Mobile 1.7, the latest version of the mobile web development framework that’s an extension of the Dojo toolkit. See how to download Dojo 1.7 from trunk and how to use Dojo Mobile in your applications. Explore the various widgets and components it offers, and learn how to wrap your web application up in a native application using PhoneGap.

Read the article in full at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-getstarteddojo/.

In this article, you will learn about MongoDB, the open source, document-oriented database management system written in C++ that provides features for scaling your databases in a production environment. Discover what benefits document-oriented databases have over traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS). Install MongoDB and start creating databases, collections, and documents. Examine Mongo’s dynamic querying features, which provide key/value store efficiency in a way familiar to RDBMS database administrators and developers.

In recent years, we have seen a growing interest in database management systems that differ from the traditional relational model. At the heart of this is the concept of NoSQL, a term used collectively to denote database software that does not use the Structured Query Language (SQL) to interact with the database. One of the more notable NoSQL projects out there is MongoDB, an open source document-oriented database that stores data in collections of JSON-like documents. What sets MongoDB apart from other NoSQL databases is its powerful document-based query language, which makes the transition from a relational database to MongoDB easy because the queries translate quite easily.

Read the full article on IBM developerWorks at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-mongodb4/index.html.

Learn about Dojo Mobile, the mobile web development framework that’s an extension of the Dojo toolkit. Using a practical example, learn how to include and use Dojo Mobile widgets and components in your applications. You’ll see how to wrap your web application in a native application using PhoneGap. This article also offers a preview of some of the new features in the next version of the framework.

In this article, learn about Dojo Mobile, which is an extension of the Dojo Toolkit. After exploring the differences between mobile web and native applications, follow an example that shows you how to include and use Dojo Mobile widgets in your applications. You’ll also learn about building native applications with PhoneGap.

Read the full article on IBM developerWorks at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-dojomobile/index.html.

Day 2 of the Source Dev Sencha conference picked up right where the first day left off. I must credit the organizers on a fantastic choice of location and venue. The weather here in Split, Croatia has been consistently glorious since I arrived here. The hotel (Le Meridien Lav) is both an excellent place to stay and a great conference venue. Myself, Darragh Duffy, Jonathan Reardon and Martha Rotter enjoyed a really great meal last night in Taverna Bota Šare near the center of Split. We were promised by the concierge that it had the best seafood in Croatia and it really lived up to the high praise.

Before diving into my thoughts on day 2, I had better mention the party last night. My thoughts on conferences are that the best networking is done over a beer, and last night was no exception to that rule. Everything kicked off in a bar right next to the hotel with a steady flow of beer going strong for the night. There were some camera guys around so I’m sure some footage of our antics will surface before too long. I had the pleasure of enjoying some late night beers with Nils Dehl, Steffen Kamper, Aditya Bansod, Denis and Ian from EMC (sorry guys didn’t catch your surnames) and Ed Spencer. Kudos to the Sencha guys for resisting the urge to accept our random pleas for various features and products, they must have been well trained in advance of this event! I heard Ed respond with “No comment” on more than one occasion – he’d make a great politician!

A little hungover and very tired, today’s agenda was a great remedy for any headache. Things kicked off bright and early with Brian Moeskau giving an overview of how to migrate applications to ExtJS 4. Brian also held a practical workshop on the same topic later in the morning. Sencha deserve a lot of credit for their work on making this process as painless as possible. The compatibility layer is going to be hugely important for a lot of existing ExtJS developers, and the fact that both versions can play nice with each other means that companies like the one I work for can start using ExtJS 4 pretty much straight away. Brian’s excellent blog post on migration is well worth looking at. You can find it at http://www.sencha.com/blog/ext-js-3-to-4-migration/.

Next up was another presentation from James Pearce, this time on working with PhoneGap. Up until now our company has deployed our applications solely over the Web, but it looks like we will inevitably need to deploy to devices natively. Thankfully Sencha Touch and PhoneGap are a match made in heaven, and the process is pretty painless when you consider just how difficult it would be to create separate applications for each target device/operating system. James posted a screencast showing the final demo from his presentation, which can be found at http://vimeo.com/23358554.

Before lunch there was a schedule change, with Jay Garcia‘s workshop on JavaScript classes and scoping being moved forward. I have read articles, blog posts and even books that try to explain JavaScript’s prototypal inheritance and scope, none of which compare to Jay’s coverage this morning. I think many developers in the room had an “A-ha” moment when Jay explained just how the “this” keyword really works in JavaScript. Watching Jay at work today has given me the urge to really dig deep and gain a stronger understanding of just how ExtJS hangs together.

After lunch, George White (aka Animal) gave a great workshop session on using JavaScript debugging tools such as Firebug for Firefox, WebKit Developer Tools, JSLint and so on. Grgur Grisogono, who organized the conference, corrected a missing semi-colon in a code example, resulting in George nicknaming him “Mr. Lint” (Edit: Damian pointed out that it was actually Jay Garcia who gave Grgur this title in his earlier workshop, thanks Damian!). What I found best about this session was the numerous tips and common issues to look out for when developing ExtJS or Sencha Touch applications. At the end of the session I got the chance to meet James Pearce, and enjoyed briefly talking to him about how we’re using Sencha’s products in our company.

Unfortunately I didn’t make it to Steffen Kamper’s talk on Ext.Direct, but returned in time for Grgur’s closing keynote, which uniquely featured him jumping around and cheering on stage, much to the delight of the audience. Grgur thanked a lot of people in the keynote, but I think he deserves thanks for his hard work and effort into organizing such a successful event.

I wish I could tell you that that’s it for today and I’ll be back to wrap up the boat trip tomorrow, but alas I must return to Cork tomorrow, which involves an early flight to London Gatwick in the morning. It’s been a great conference, I’ve learned a lot and I’ve met many great people. Hopefully I’ll get to meet you all again in Austin, TX in October at SenchaCon.

For more coverage on the conference, see Darragh Duffy’s blog post which covers the entire two days. The URL is http://www.darraghduffy.ie/?p=294.