Posts Tagged: dojox

A couple of days ago, Nicholas Zakas wrote an article about secure client side storage. I think the scenario he mentioned (working from a cyber cafe) is not unsafe by nature, and could be well handled by an application. Nonetheless, client side storage such as localStorage still is subject to DNS spoofing attacks (which is the main security issue, I think). To handle this, one needs to encrypt the keys and values in the store.

So here you go: dojox.storage.encrypted, a Blowfish encrypted storage. It sits on top of dojox.storage, and you get all the dojo storage manager goodness, mainly the automatic selection of the best storage provider available. It exposes the complete API that dojox.storage does. If an attacker gains access to the storage area, he can still nuke the storage, but the data found within will be useless.
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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!

Update III: Dojo 1.5 introduces robust Promises with dojo.deferred as Krys Zyp explains in this SitePen post.

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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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If you use animations, you probably use them to animate CSS properties. But this post is about some real bareknuckle animation – using the dojo toolkit. We’ll have a look into dojo.Animation and talk about the curve, the line, easing and rate, and we’ll check out (the somehow undocumented) dojox.fx._core – and see how to work with multidimensional lines.

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Update: The providers attached to this post are part of dojox.storage now – no need to download them, just get a copy of dojo, and everything is there.

Update II: dojox.storage won’t make it into dojo 2.0 and is not compatible with the new dojo/store API. For future-safe persistent client-side storage, see Storehouse – Client Side Object Storage for the Dojo Store API

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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