Higgins for President

What an incredibly busy week! I'm finally getting settled in from a painful week of sunshine, technology and drinking in beautiful southern Florida, still suffering slightly from the rapid drop in ambient temperature I experienced exiting the plane in Knoxville [several hours late, no less]. But, I'm here, and back in business -- it's good to be home.

A big thanks to SpringSource for forcing me talk about Dojo at the annual SpringOne America conference. I've been there all week, and the experience was entirely positive: got to meet a whole host of SpringPeople, talk to countless java developers, attend several quality talks, and ran into a number of Dojo contributors both known and anonymous (always nice to have a face to a name). Bonus points for the late-afternoon-beach-parties, endless supply of coffee, and incredible locale selection. I delivered [what I felt to be] a well-received talk about the philosophies and structure behind Dojo from base to util to dojoc/, covered a lot of great material and just had an all-around great experience. Here's to hoping they like my paper for the upcoming SpringOne Europe tour (which ironically is in the same hotel I stayed in during my last visit to Amsterdam, this time three years ago) . Salud.

My slides from the presentation are available on SlideShare.

So a week of hard work on the beaches of Florida also yielded several other awesome events: A night of good Cuban food, drinks and debauchery with another of my oldest friends (which isn't so nice anymore, as we're 'rounding to 30 now', and old is becoming an increasingly sensitive word) was only the beginning:

Start to Finish: A motion to adopt John Resig's newest creation Sizzle as a top-level project to the Dojo Foundation was recently proposed to the mailing list, and passed unanimously 21-nil. The Dojo Toolkit was considering adopting the 'idea of a unified querySelectorAll engine', and suggested the idea to John to ensure "all the things the Dojo Foundation is trying to achieve" were in place -- enabling the Dojo Toolkit to use this new code (as well as anyone else wishing to adopt it). There seem to be a lot of mixed emotions about the overall implications of this -- and I'd like to briefly throw in my take:

There is only one est. Be it tallest, smallest, smartest, or fastest. Until which time we can defer to a fastest native implementation for CSS selectors, we should collaborate on a unified codebase, out in the open, and available to all. This is all just JavaScript, we can offload library-specific redundancy by utilizing js's dynamic nature and create some portable underlying thing (which coincidentally Dojo already did to a degree) -- we are all fighting the same battle, Moore is on our side, and we should shift our performance-related optimizations at what it is we as toolkits choose to do with the nodes given to us by whatever selector the spec/browser provides ...

I respect their decision not to adopt the code-base, though am glad there are now two query engines available with which we might start this period of cooperation I long for. I love the fact they are even able to make such a choice. I welcome John to the "Project Lead Council" (I think is what it's called ... ) of the Dojo Foundation, and look forward to working more closely with yet another incredibly talented coder.

Dojo 1.2.3 Released - We've already quietly released 1.2.1 and 1.2.2, both with minor (though critical stability fixes) changes, but had one large issue needing attention before commiting to pushing the release to the various CDNs. I pushed a small announcement, and the source is available in the usual location. The 1.2 release was a strong one, and I might have secretly tricked Adam Peller into cutting a 1.2.2 a day early so that we would have a 1.2.3 (which has a nice ring to it, as far as version numbers go).

Zend Framework 1.7.1 was released, which I note because I failed to mention the release of 1.7 a few weeks back, which included an update to using Dojo 1.2 and several other fixes. The release of Dojo 1.2.3 should be a transparent update for Zend FrameWork 1.7 / Dojo 1.2 users. Congrats to all the Zend developers! I've installed Git, and have been playing with Matthew O'Phinney's pastebin app in the hopes of putting together a good example of best Dojo practices within Zend Framework ...

dojo.beer() happened in Munich over the weekend. This is the second of the type put on by the Uxebu folk, and it was reportedly a great success. From what was only a handful of German Dojo Developers grew exponentially it seems -- I even had the pleasure of attending virtually via iChat alongside Dylan, though hopefully I'll be able to attend physically sometime soon ... Thanks to Mayflower for hosting the event, and Wolfram, Tobias, and Nikolai for organizing everything! I love seeing this kind of community-driven meet up happen, be it formal or informal.

That in mind -- I'd love to start something similar regionally: A SouthEast-based DDD, just to get together for the face-to-face and have a dojo.beer(), talk shop and otherwise interact. Tennessee alone houses several Dojo developers I know personally, and I think it feasible to coordinate something somewhere reasonably close: Atlanta, GA? Charlotte, NC? -- In the immediate future we may be doing a small Nashville, TN dojo.beer() -- so if you are interested drop me a line and we'll see what we can put together and pick a good central locale.