The Dojo Foundation on February 15, 2012 announced the Dojo Mobile 1.7 toolkit along with visual tools for mobile user interface and mobile theme construction in Maqetta Preview 4.

Developers now have a complete set of mobile tools that deliver the cross-discipline, reliability and customization benefits needed by Enterprise teams. Today’s announcement represents a major milestone in delivering integrated design-to-development Cloud tooling, along with a comprehensive open source widget set for the desktop and mobile devices.

While the desktop world has standardized on HTML-based open web technologies, until now, a large percentage of mobile development teams targeting phones and tables have created different platform-specific “native” versions for each different device, which results in high costs for creation and maintenance.

With these announcements, along with other related advances in the industry (e.g., proliferation of HTML5 capable browsers on mobile devices, improved mobile network speeds including 4G and maturing hybrid web/native tools such as PhoneGap), developers can now create high-quality mobile applications using the same cross-platform HTML5 used in desktop browsers, with all of the cost efficiencies and disciplined team development approaches needed by Enterprise teams.

The Dojo Toolkit is an industry-leading JavaScript toolkit that scales from simple, small-scale development to large-scale team development, and is used by thousands of companies around the world. The Dojo Toolkit is a comprehensive JavaScript development platform that provides key Enterprise-development benefits.

The benefits include, all technologies available from a single distribution (eliminating  mix/match conflicts from different suppliers), backwards compatibility across releases, sophisticated widget framework for extending built-in widgets and creating reusable custom widgets, integrated build system for minimizing network requests and download sizes, common globalization framework, and a set of core widgets that use a common accessibility framework to meet common government accessibility requirements.

Maqetta is a Dojo Foundation open source project for visual authoring of HTML5 user interfaces, desktop and mobile. Dojo Foundation makes the Maqetta application available for free use at http://maqetta.org and provides ZIP downloads for installing Maqetta on intranet servers or running locally. Maqetta is in its technology preview phase, with a 1.0 release expected later in 2012.

These new resources provide the following benefits to mobile development teams:

• With Dojo Toolkit 1.7 – Comprehensive toolkit for building cross-platform mobile applications using HTML5 (both browser-based and installed from apps stores)
• With Maqetta Preview 4 – Strong tools for integrating the design team into the mobile development process, including CSS theme tools that ease development and conformance to corporate visual styling standards

New features in Dojo Toolkit 1.7 include:

• A complete, Enterprise-ready mobile widget set. The mobile widget set provides a full set of common mobile user interface controls that emulate native device controls and support native interactivity, including touch gestures.
• A collection of mobile CSS themes that provide either device-specific, platform-native look & feel for iPhone, Android and other devices, or a general cross-platform look & feel, and allow for extensive customization so that Enterprise developers can modify the mobile CSS themes to match corporate mobile styling standards.
• A refactored core that is optimized for small footprint and high performance on smart phones and tablets, starting at under 4KB gzipped.
• A new JavaScript loader (AMD) engine that improves the speed of network requests, enables multiple versions of particular modules to run simultaneously and helps reduce download size.
• A revamped and simplified client-side data management engine (dojo.store) that makes it easy to create data-centric web applications and easy to bind data stores programmatically to widgets such as  data grids, trees, and menus.

Maqetta Preview 4 provides:

• Visual authoring support for Dojo 1.7′s extensive mobile widget set and mobile CSS themes.
• Non-programmers and programmers can create true WYSIWYG mobile user interfaces via simple drag/drop from a widget palette into a life-size replica of a mobile device silhouette.
• Powerful mobile CSS theme editor that allow designers to use visual tools for customizing Dojo 1.7′s mobile CSS themes to match corporate branding standards.
• Maqetta creates actual running HTML, CSS and JS that can be previewed on actual devices and ultimately handed off to developers to transform into a production application.

“With Maqetta’s Preview 4 release, in addition to drag/drop creation of HTML5 mobile user interfaces without programming, Maqetta now provides a mobile CSS theme editor so that companies can customize widget and HTML styling to match corporate mobile branding standards,” says Jon Ferraiolo, project lead for Dojo’s Maqetta open source project. “With the new features in Preview 4, Maqetta now provides a critical mass of capability that allows companies to bring designers into collaborative Enterprise mobile app development.”

“We are excited by the promise of Maqetta for improving the speed and quality of our Enterprise development efforts for both desktop and mobile,” says Roman Chanclor, Interface Design Director at Enterprise Information Management, an industry leader in business process automation.

EIM delivers Information Technology consulting, design, planning, and implementation services for organizations looking to rapidly automate enterprise business processes, streamline the management of complex case environments, and turn information into insight.

“Maqetta allows our designers to create WYSIWYG user interface prototypes for both desktop and mobile without programming.  Maqetta authors its prototypes using the same HTML5, JavaScript and CSS that our developers use, making it easy to transition from design to development,” Chanclor added.

“With Dojo, we’re very excited to offer a unified toolkit that uses the same, highly efficient underlying code base for web and mobile applications,” said Dylan Schiemann, chairman of the Dojo Foundation.   ”And with Maqetta and Dojo 1.7, it’s now possible for non-programmers to get started creating application user interfaces with an open-source, web-based drag and drop tool that outputs elegant source code.”

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