Higgins for President

Last Wednesday at our weekly team meeting, Alex Russell announced his resignation as long-time Project Lead for the Dojo Toolkit, the open-source project I've been contributing to for the past two years. I still may be in partial shock (and partial euphoria) about the resignation, but not near much as finding out the nominee: me!

Today, the voting was closed, and I have officailly been named the new [and improved?] Dojo Project Lead by a unanimous 27-to-zero vote of my peers, the Dojo core developers. Contained within those ranks of committers are some of the most talented, friendly, and innovative developers I've ever had the pleasure of working with, and am humbled by the outcome. I'd like to thank everyone involved: Your faith in my abilities, and our common vision and dedication are going to ensure the Dojo Toolkit will remain a major presence within the Open Source, OpenWeb, and Ajax communities for a very long time. Our collective commitment to excellence and never-ending desire to push the limits of browser capabilities will continue to thrive, even as the landscape changes beneath us.

As much as I love talking about myself, I'm going to keep this brief. Alex addressed some highlighted questions in his initial announcement, and I'd like to follow up with a small [read: single item] Q&A of my own:

Q: What does this mean?
Not too terribly much. Dojo is a very mature project: The product of countless man hours, real-world testing, use, mistakes, changes, and growth. We've established who we are, and what we intend to do, and my goal is the keep us all on that same track -- working together to create and maintain the best open source set of tools for web developers. The Toolkit is, in truth, run by smaller groups of committers and contributors -- each applying their own expertise to the components they own or otherwise maintain, myself included.

It doesn't, however, mean there won't be change! We change every day as it is: seldom does a day pass that a bug isn't fixed, filed, or commented upon, or a new function or component becomes a reality. It is too early for me to have formulated any serious plans or opinions on the future of Dojo, but It will likely mimic that which I am already a strong proponent of: ongoing open innovation, providing great tools, enabling the community, embracing the community support and contributions, all while never wavering from the overall goal: dojo.greatness();

I'm looking forward to this experience, and to working with all of the exceptional talent the Ajax community has to offer. I'm usually available as phiggins on irc.freenode.net (#dojo, among others), and you may already know me as dante in the Dojo Forums and Trac, so drop by -- I'm happy to answer any questions or concerns.
I'll have several more announcements and whatnot coming as time progresses, so be on the look ...

Thanks again to everyone for their support. I am confident the power and direction of Dojo will only continue to improve, and it would never have gotten this far without each and every one of you.

As a quick example of unobtrusive and degradable Dojo, I'm going to add couple of lines of JavaScript to this blog post, and convert the existing unordered list labeled "Blog Roll" into a new widget I created, which will be released with Dojo 1.2. Here goes:

 
dojo.addOnLoad(function(){
  dojo.require("dojox.widget.Roller");
  dojo.addOnLoad(function(){
    dojo.query("#sidebar #linkcat-2 > ul").instantiate(dojox.widget.Roller, { delay:3200 });
  });
});
 

This "embedded addOnLoad" trick is really fun. After the initial/body onLoad, I'm dynamically pulling in the Roller code, and all of its dependencies. This could be avoided if I had included the Roller class in a custom build, but I'm more concerned with the content rendering initially than I am with limiting the number of XHR requests (we're doing it after onLoad, so no blocking is taking place).

Without JavaScript enabled, it should appear as a simple unordered-list. At the time of this writing, there are only three links in my blog roll (I have friends, I promise), but this ensures the list will only ever take up a single line of screen real estate, regardless of the list length.

The code is degradable, reusable, and completely valid XHTML. What more could you ask for? If validation doesn't concern you, you can simply add a dojoType="dojox.widget.Roller" to an existing unordered list, and let the automatic parsing take over for you, creating even less work. There is a solution in Dojo for everyone's needs.

The test file for the Roller, and RollerSlide can be viewed in the nightly builds.