Update: Micheil Smith had a cool idea to improve this and posted it in the comments. I have updated the test page and the code examples to reflect his idea. Thanks Micheil!

Update II: Ben Hockey proposed to do the whole thing without using the pub/sub system. I for one think its a good idea, but in case you want the topic version, I’ll leave the test page and add another one with the topic-less version. Thanks Ben!

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One of the things/ideas/concepts that I really like about CommonJS is Promises.

Promises? A brief explanation from the CommonJS API:

Promises provide a well-defined interface for interacting with an object that represents the result of an action that is performed asynchronously, and may or may not be finished at any given point in time.

To hear more about Promises, I highly recommend these two posts.
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Last year, Brian Leroux’s Lawnchair caught my interest – it is an easy and fast way to access local persistant local storage.

Uh, persistant local storage?

Ahm, yeah, in case you don’t know, that means a client-side storage, be it in a browser, or in an Air app. It’s not very popular, but that concept has been around for a long time. So why local? There are two major reasons for it: First, we need this for apps and tools that work offline – and apps and tools that work online but need an offline backup and sync later. Kris Zyp wrote a post about the JsonRestStore and OfflineRest back in 2008, he goes a little into detail there. Secondly, we need it for apps and tools that rely on persistence for other reasons, no matter if online or offline – like it happended to me. When I ran into Lawnchair, I had the idea to build a tool that was monitoring CSS selector usage on websites and apps (you know how you sometimes lose control about CSS selectors in webapps…). To achieve this, I needed to store data locally, and persistent.
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Well, I don’t really see a use for FloatingPane, except as a windowing system for projects like LucidDesktop, but I got the impression that many people just love the FloatingPane. However, it caught my attention these days.

One of its major drawbacks – and the one that keeps it pretty far from becoming a joyful member of the dijit namespace – is the lack of keyboard accessibility. It has plenty of other issues and could use some refactoring, but this one is outstanding. Hm, adding keyboard access shouldn’t be too hard I thought and went for it…
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Though many people would disagree, I for one like to use fieldsets to structure complex forms. Even better do I like fieldsets that are collapsible.

As there is no such fieldset with dojo, I decided to write my own widget. While doing so, I learnt an interesting lesson…

First, I wrote it pretty simple, inheriting the widget from dijit._Widget and dijit._Templated. It had a toggle button next to its legend, which could be clicked. The toggle was a simple display none/block change.
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Or: Still ending the ga.js wait…

It has become quiet here the last weeks – due to an awesome trip to Italy. Returning home, I decided to put Google Analytics on this page.

As I always hate waiting for the ga.js to load while visiting websites, I wanted a mechanism to delay the load of it. Why this is a good idea has been discussed often enough elsewhere, so we take it as fact. Peter Higgins once wrote such a wrapper for dojo, and as of dojo 1.3, it’s officially included in dojox (see Alex Russel’s post). But this Wordpress theme runs jQuery, and I didn’t want to have two frameworks in one website – so I searched for something that did the job for jQuery.
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