Experimenting with Dojo Mobile

In my work I specialize in Natural Language Processing (NLP), text mining, and general AI development. That said I find myself writing a lot of web apps and what I really want is an easy to use web client stack with rich controls and that facilitates writing one web app that looks and works OK in web browsers, Android phones and tablets, iPhones, and iPads.

Five years ago I wrote a very simple web app cookingspace.com that let me look up the nutrients (using the USDA nutrition database) for recipes we frequently make. I have just spent a few hours rewriting the front end using Dojo Mobile, removing a lot of features that I don't need anymore that is hosted at mobile.cookingspace.com. The new app lets me quickly check nutrients and also on portable devices I can use it while grocery shopping to make sure I get the ingredients I need for making dinner. Both apps are deployed at Heroku (thanks Heroku!).

Dojo is really a nice web client toolkit. I suggest you take a look if you haven't tried it. I have used Dojo for years with server side code written in Common Lisp, Ruby, and more recently Clojure.

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