I was giving a presentation at an ESRI gathering hosted in reading at Microsoft this week, talking about all things Silverlight and MapIt, and very little unsurprisingly about the Flex API. During a presentation about the Web API’s I mentioned JavaScript and Silverlight as two offerings that whilst can do similar things, need to be considered carefully in relation to the audience in questioning and the tasks they wish to perform. Now I like the Silverlight API and as I mentioned in the talk it can really allow for the avoidance of browser support pain by abstracting away the layer between your...

To celebrate the upgrading of the JavaScript API to 1.5 I decided to have a little play with adding a where are you from page to the site (you can get too it from the page link above). This is a little routine to take your IP address and geo-locate where you are. It’s a very simple application in the style of Al Pascual’s Map Stats Silverlight application that you can get here. In fact it’s almost the same, except it works with Dojo uses a different IP geolocator from IPInfoDB as the one used by Al didn’t know places like New Zealand existed. It was an interesting application to write, not...

I’ll start this post by saying I like Dojo. It makes developing JavaScript a lot easier than hacking the code yourself especially when trying to support multiple browsers. As with everything though it’s not perfect.  Whilst getting hold of the code is as simple as linking to the AOL hosted site, getting hold of the information about how to use the code makes you feel like your playing some sort of Japanese console adventure game, probably on the Wii, hunting the internet for snippets of code, working examples or even fully fledge sites, that might give you a small insight into how the library...