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Involvement and support of the Dojo Foundation will help further the usage of Ajax technology by developers in open source projects.

The Dojo Toolkit is a JavaScript toolkit that has been made available for open source under the Academic Free License and a BSD License. The project recently released version 0.3.1 as a maintenance update and recommended Dojo users upgrade to it.

AOL has been involved with Dojo since February 2006. The company provided hosting for Dojo, and donated a JavaScript Compiler tool, which analyzes JavaScript code and conducts operations on that analysis, such as strip unused code or provide metrics on call patterns.

Support from AOL for Dojo will continue. The online services firm announced today it would help further Ajax and JavaScript adoption in the open source community. AOL cited Forrester Research on the rise of open source usage, with 55 percent of American companies using open source technology in mission critical applications.

AOL has been acting as a founder and contributor to Dojo's Accessibility Working Group during their involvement with the project. Dojo Foundation president Alex Russell said AOL's support has made "a significant impact" on the development of the Dojo Toolkit.

"The Dojo Foundation is deservedly recognized throughout the industry for making web development projects not only faster to develop, easier to understand, and richer, but at commercial and professional quality grades," said Sree Kotay, senior vice president, AOL Technology.

Web developers can get an idea of Dojo's capabilities from the feature list Dojo provided with news of the 0.3.1 release on their website:

•  Less boilerplate when writing widgets
•  A new lightweight animation system that makes using and building animations dead simple
•  Tested, high-performance local storage engine
•  Cross-domain Ajax support and cross-domain package loading
•  The ability to bundle CSS as well as HTML in profile builds
•  Better performance
•  New widgets:
    •  SortableTable
    •  TitlePane
    •  Form validation
    •  Menus and menu bars
    •  Google and Yahoo maps
On their blog, Dojo posted news of the JS Linker being committed to the project's repository:

The purpose of JavaScript Linker is to process HTML/JavaScript code base to prepare code for deployment by reducing file size, create source code documentation, obfuscate source code to protect intellectual property, and help gather source code metrics for source code analysis & improvements. The source code modifications can either be made in place by overwriting the input files, or can be saved to a user-specified output directory.

The tool is considered "Alpha" at this point, so use at your own risk, and we won't be doing lots of support for it right now. Also, only a few tasks have been implemented so far (janitor, muffler, prettyprinter).

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.