The Laszlo blog announced yesterday that OpenLaszlo will use and contribute to Dojo. For the uninitiated, Dojo is one of the many DHTML/Ajax toolkits that help DHTML developers get their work done. Since OpenLaszlo is moving towards supporting more runtimes (other than Flash) and DHTML is one of those "runtimes", this sounds like a great idea (rather than have the Laszlo team write their own toolkit from scratch). The fact that they'll be bringing their contributions back to Dojo sounds like a win-win.
Check it out. Glen, Erik and Emil have been working on implementing Canvas in Internet Explorer. Looks like that's done and now up on SourceForge: Download here. An open-source project from Google... Brilliant! I only hope it's not a cruel April Fool's Joke.
Now that all 4 major browsers (IE, Firefox 1.5, Opera 9 and Safari) can do the Canvas thing, this should lead to some really interesting times. I hope they join forces with Mark Finkle and use the same cross-browser drawing API to get SVG fully implemented in IE. Me? I'll just sit back and watch the magic happen.
A couple quick links regarding Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) in the wild. Read the rest of this entry ...
Tim Altman reports that Opera has decided to open things up even more and start weekly builds. A new blog is in place to keep track of the Desktop Browser weekly builds and any other issues that might come up.
Though not as thoroughly tested as a beta or even preview build, weeklies are great news for me, since there was a rather serious bug in the latest Opera Preview 2 that was preventing me from using it at work (proxy issue).
I think the more open Opera's development process becomes, the larger its comunity will become. Now if only we could get an open bug database...
Ah, the benefits of keeping your ear to the RSS/Atom wire. I found this entry in the svg-developers Yahoo! newsgroup which hints that the next version of Google Maps will have support for SVG. Looks like my Christmas Wish (see bottom of entry) may come true after all.
I followed some of the links, and it looks like the currently pre-alpha version of the Google Maps API (version 2.37) does indeed use some JavaScript to create a SVG <path> element (search for "svg" and "path"). Unfortunately, this thread says there are some bugs in the code (non-SVG related) that prevent people from using it at the moment.
Of course it's a little premature, maybe Google will decide that integrating SVG within an HTML page is too much of a hack job. I know I have given up once or twice on that, myself due to browser issues but seem to have struck upon a somewhat reasonable solution recently. Of course if they restrict their SVG usage to only Firefox and Opera, it will simplify the integration.
Anyway, if the next version of Google Maps does have SVG support it will surely be a sign that SVG is here to stay (even if Yahoo seems to have gone with a Flash-based approach). Looks like Mozilla's decision to include limited SVG support in Firefox 1.5 was a good one for SVG adoption after all.