Infrequently Noted

Dojo 1.3 is here! (download site)

If you're already using Dojo, this should be a no-brainer upgrade. It's out-and-out better. As a quick example, dojo.create("tagname", { /properties/ }) is now the preferred way to build DOM nodes quickly. Its simple API will be natural to anyone who has used dojo.attr(). Even better, Pete's exciting PlugD version of dojo.js has been updated to 1.3 as well.

1.3's Core features the new "Acme" CSS selector engine which provides a big boost in speed for many operations in the fast-path. I blogged before about the work we did to make Acme fast, and rest assured it is (in aggregate, across all use cases) quicker than any other selector system you can get your hands on today. But selector performance isn't where it's really at, and I've been saying that for a long time.

Luckily, Pete Higgins decided to prove it and has been working on a new set of benchmarks with the help of other toolkit vendors (to ensure fairness) called "TaskSpeed". Dojo 1.3 wins by a wide margin. Across all the reported browsers so far, Dojo is at least 2 times faster than other toolkits on common DOM operations. We've worked very hard over the years to make sure that Dojo's APIs don't encourage you to do things that will hurt you later, and TaskSpeed finally shows how much this philosophy pays off:

Given that DOM is the primary bottleneck in most apps DOM is a big bottleneck in today's apps, usually just behind network I/O and these tests demonstrate how Dojo's approach to keeping things fast pays off not just on micro benchmarks like CSS selector speed, performance improvements to single toolkit functions, or even file size - but on aggregate performance where it really matters. Dojo's modern, compact syntax for these common operations doesn't slow it down, either. For instance, if you go check out the TaskSpeed reporting page, you'll see that where browsers are slowest (IE6/7/8, etc.), Dojo's focus on performance pays off most. Why use a toolkit that's going to hurt you when it really counts, particularly when Dojo so easy to get started with? Dojo's Core has been designed from the ground up with APIs that encourage you to do things that are fast and keep you from doing things that are slow unless you really know what you're doing. In some cases, we've made hard size-on-the-wire tradeoffs in order to keep actual app performance speedy. That hard engineering doesn't show up in micro-benchmarks or single test release-over-release improvements or the "my toolkit is smaller" comparisons that some would prefer that web developers focus on. It's easy to win rigged games, after all. It's only when you see APIs composed together in real-world ways, across browsers, that you can start to see the real impact of a toolkit's design philosophy. Dojo is designed to help you make things that are awesome for users, and that means they need to be FAST.

Other toolkits have released performance numbers of late, and most of them have been either reported badly or run without much rigor, so it's exciting to see everyone finally pitching in to build end-to-end tests that show how library design decisions interact with real-world realities of browsers. The TaskSpeed tests have been designed to be both even-handed and reliable (no times below timer resolution, etc.). The reporting page is also designed to make the results understandable and put them in context. A lot of care has been taken to keep this benchmark honest. JavaScript developers have suffered at the hand of chart junk for far too long.

I can't do 1.3 justice in a single blog post, so I recommend that you check out these resources and then just dive in:

• Pete's release announcement
• The Official 1.3 Release Notes
• The new Documentation (at Dojo Campus)
• The new 1.3 Core Cheat Sheet
• PlugD: An even easier way to get going with Dojo
• Run the TaskSpeed tests for yourself then see how the toolkits stack up (hint: everything you thought you knew about JS library performance was probably wrong.)
• Check out integrations for Dojo that you can probably drop right in to your workflow, no matter what stack you're using: , Spring Web Flow (Java), Dojango (Django/Python), DRails (Ruby/RoR), Tatami (Java/GWT), Zend (PHP), or Dojomino (Domino Server).

Big thanks to the folks who tried out the betas and RC's and helped make 1.3 solid.

I suppose we had it too good. JavaScript hackers of the world lived in relative licensing bliss. Organizations like the Dojo Foundation built and preserved large swaths of high-quality code for anyone to build on, and even the outlier toolkits eventually came in from the cold. The open were even progressing toward even more transparent and community-driven development. Politics, of course, existed, but BSD-licensed code was the norm and Foundations helped guarantee the rights of users.

Alas, no, we've been doing it all wrong. Excuse me while I go rinse the taste of situational ethics and lost plots out of my mouth.

For years now Quicksilver has been the first thing I install on any new Mac I buy. I'll admit to not being the most advanced Quicksilver user, which I think is easing my transition to the new Quick Search Bar. Unlike it's windows counterpart, QSB for the Mac seems to be meeting most of my needs as a launcher. We'll see how it goes.

Simon Johnson and James Kwak make a strong case for common-sense: bankers are fungible commodities.

chromeexperiments.com is up!

Trying out the experiments on the Chrome 2.0 beta or Safari 4's beta feels like the early days of the web all over again, in a good way. New things seem possible...like there's stuff we can do now that was off limits before. Beautiful stuff, particularly Dean McNamee's Monster and Colorscube, Ryan Alexander's Canopy, and the awesome Browsermation.