So, what is a nano widget? It’s a lightweight widget that only has the code you use. If you use some tabs on your site, why would you need all that extra code for handling widget destruction, tabs on the bottom, IE6/7 support, child layouts, high contrast accessibility, and so on?

For this presentation, I created a new Dojo library called nano that currently contains a lightweight lightbox, tab container, and accordion container. You can find the code in my GitHub repo: https://github.com/cb1kenobi/nano.

Here’s my slides. NOTE: slides require Chrome or Safari.

DojoConf had a great turnout and was very well organized thanks to the hard work of Chris Williams (@voodootikigod), Laura Williams (@lwilliams, and the remaining unsung heros. There was some good swag including a little Lego minifig branded with the Dojo logo thanks to LifeImage.

There were many good talks that I listened to. I really enjoyed Mike Wilcox’s presentation about Dojo and HTML5. In short, Dojo plays well with HTML5 forms, SVG, offline storage, and web sockets, but fails with things like semantic tags, audio, and video. There’s definitely room for improvement.

Luis Montes gave a great talk about HTML5 Game Development and Dojo (slides require use a modern browser). He talks about rendering graphics using a canvas element and physics with Box2D. Along the way, he’s describing how to leverage Dojo to make things such as object oriented game objects, server communication, and event handling.

Rebecca Murphey gave a really interesting talk about Building Large Apps using Dojo. She talks about they used Dojo to build Toura, a mobile content creation system. The big take away here is don’t build big apps, build several small apps and glue them together. Break up everything into components and use Dojo’s excellent event system to wire those components up.

On the last night of DojoConf, a group of us moved the after-after party back to hotel to close out what was a great conference!

DojoConf is the first real Dojo conference. There have been Dojo Developer Days in the past, but those are generally planning and decision oriented meetings. DojoConf is real content and a real schedule. There’s a great lineup of speakers and topics.

See you there!

The cutoff date for this years OSB proposals was just a few days ago and there are about 400 submissions. I considered submitting a talk about Dojo, but due to time constraints, I had to pass this year. Regardless, there are several talks that are pretty interesting and I hope they get selected. The topics that I’m most interested in are:

• Distributed databases and data modeling
• Cloud deployment and management
• PHP tricks
• Drizzle
• Websockets
• Concurrency and threading
• Geolocation
• Scalability and performance

A little disappointed there weren’t more JavaScript or C/C++ talks. For a complete list of sessions that I’d like to attend, check out my favorites sessions.

April 1st, 2010 is the last day to get the early bird discount for $225, otherwise it goes up to a whopping $300. You can register on their site: http://opensourcebridge.org/attend/.

The first dojo.connect online conference is coming up this week February 10-12, 2010. I’ll be giving a talk about Debugging Dojo Applications. I’ll be covering the following:

• Common mistakes and how to avoid them
• Web browser debug tools
• Built-in Dojo debugging tools
• Methods for finding and fixing syntax issues or malformed data
• Writing tests to trap specific bugs

There is still room left, so head over to http://www.widespreadconferences.com/ and sign up today!