[Update] - Mayflower was so kind to offer a conference room of their office in Munich to hold a few talks, exchange know-how and talk Dojo, so our schedule is changing a little bit.

The main event will be held on Saturday, December 6th at Mayflower (times, address, schedule will be announced soon) and we will then go somewhere to have dinner and dojo.beers(). We will still meet on Friday 5th for dojo.beers() and everybody who is in town is invited to join.

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We've announced a new project, the Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR. This project makes it easier to use Dojo for higher level desktop application features within AIR.

While looking at some Adobe technology, I came across James Wards site. James is a Technical Evangelist for Adobe. One of the links he has on his site is a Flash based performance application that "walks you through benchmarks for various methods of loading data in RIAs." The data was used at a conference to show the Adobe performance vs Dojo and general Ajax/JSON.

Dojo rarely wins popularity polls, and I've often complained about the lack of science behind polls. The reasons can be explained for a variety of reasons, but with the latest results from the O'Reilly InsideRIA poll, Which AJAX framework do you currently prefer?, "with almost 50% of the vote, Dojo is the clear winner."

Learn how to write acceptance tests and test "user stories" with your applications using the new doh.robot module, dijit.robotx, for Dojo 1.2, without modifying your application code or even upgrading your version of Dojo.

I'm pleased to announce the launch of the Dojo Foundation web site. I first demonstrated the site at Dojo Developer Day V in Boston a few weeks ago, and we're pleased to have something worthy of representing the foundation.

It would not have been possible without the hard work and assistance of Torrey Rice, Chris Anderson, Tobias Klipstein, and Dustin Machi. The Dojo Foundation site is minimalistic by design, and is powered by Dojango, making it one of the first sites to use this toolkit for making Dojo and Django integration easy!

If you were at Ajax Experience or Dojo Developer Day a couple weeks back, you probably saw the quick demo of the Project Zero Visual HTML Page Editor tool that I mentioned in my last post. This tool is written entirely in Dojo (currently 1.1 moving to 1.2), and allows drag and drop editing of HTML pages that contain Dojo widgets, and allows you to edit the source of the page, and switch back to visual design mode. 

A short video that takes you through the tool is now available here.

Right on the heels of the Dojo 1.2 release, Aptana added support for Dojo 1.2. Aptana has been working closely together with Dojo and SitePen to make support for new Dojo releases extremely timely.

Dojo 1.2 has a lot of great new features. There are two in dijit I'd like to (very briefly) mention:

The first is all the look-and-feel improvements. We've changed colors, margins, etc. to make things look better, and look/work more like users expect, and perhaps mainly we've fixed a bunch of visual glitches There were almost 100 things fixed with visual issues with the widgets.

A lot has been going on in Dojo-land, and we're finally ready to push out the release. I have tentatively named this the 'Sliced Bread' release, as over the last six months each new item has truly felt like "the best thing since sliced bread". This iteration of the Dojo Toolkit has a very large delta, countless levels of innovation, cleverness, polish, and usefulness, as well as several internal changes regarding the overall project.