August 9th was the day for the first Dojo event in Israel and thanks to Yoav Rubin from IBM Research Labs in Haifa, we were able to hold the event in the great Auditorium of the amazingly located IBM building in Haifa.
To give you a little impression of what kind of working environment the folks at IBM have, I uploaded a panorama image from Yoav’s office.
The day started as planned with coffee and snacks and a Dojo introduction giving everybody who wasn’t really familiar with the Dojo Toolkit a better idea of what it actually is. A few demos such as xRay where shown to show some of the advanced features of Dojo such as live charting, custom themeing and much more.
After a short break we continued with a talk on how to design mobile architectures with the Dojo Toolkit for platforms such as PhoneGap, W3C widgets and other mobile platforms supporting JavaScript/HTML and CSS. This is a very interesting topic and it was great to share the experience we made at uxebu on finding viable solutions for the challenges we face. The third talk was a quick overview of the current documentation efforts for Dojo and different ways of finding the information you need when you are stuck or simply looking for API docs or similar.
Before the break, Tomer Mahlin from IBM in Jerusalem, who is working on the BIDI implementation in Dojo, gave a very interesting talk on the challenges, developers face when writing applications supporting BIDI. Not having to deal with the issues you get confronted with when having to develop BIDI applications, this talk was eye opening and very interesting.
After a great lunch we jumped into a hands on session building a very simple mobile app running on both PhoneGap and devices with a widget runtime supporting W3C widgets installed. This gave the audience a glimpse into mobile development and the challenges but also really exciting features.
In total there were about 45 people attending the event which is an amazing amount of people for such a first time event, thanks again to everyone attending and especially to Yoav Rubin and the folks at IBM to make this happen.
I am already looking forward to the next Dojo event in Israel and hope that we can be part of it again.
Following are the slides to give you a little impression of the events content.