SoC successes
The Dojo Foundation has been very lucky in having had so many supporters (Google, Mozilla, SitePen) and so many interested students and mentors for the summer internships. While some of them aren't yet wrapped up, today's announcement of the linker hitting trunk makes me want to at least give an overview of what's been accomplished so far.
dojo.gfx -- portable 2D graphics with a DOM
Unlike <canvas> based solutions, dojo.gfx.* gives you what you really want when you're building apps: a good way to draw a shape that you can attach event handlers to. It's also not limited to whatever rectangle you've carved out on-screen for the drawing area. Kun Xi, Eugene Lazutkin, and Gavin Doughtie have been cranking on this all summer and in Dojo 0.4, you'll be able to say "give me a circle here" and you won't be constrained by artificial box constraints or incompatible event handling. I can't wait to see what gets built with this by people who can design beautiful things. The sky is, finally, the limit.
Plugins for Editor2
Heng Liu and Paul Sowden have been reworking the already fast Editor2 component to support plugins. In the process, Heng has added image insertion dialogs, find/replace support, and contextual menus. When Editor2 was originally designed, flexibility was lost for speed. Now it's got both, and extensibility to boot.
The Linker
This is the holy grail of JavaScript optimization: removing "dead" code. Dojo already provides a package system to help prevent including too much and a build-time compressor to help reduce the size on the wire of what you do need, but the linker does all of this one better by analyzing the application and figuring out what functions are entirely unused. Thanks to the generosity of AOL, and the hard work of Satish Sekharan, James Burke, and Uwe Hoffman, Dojo now packs such a beast. It's not integrated into the build system yet, and probably won't be "prime time" until 0.5, but it works. I'm a huge fan of incremental optimization, and a linker like this will be hugely valuable to large-scale sites that want to make use of any of the JS frameworks that are helping to provide a consistent surface area for developers.
Other projects are still underway and I don't want to jinx them by talking about them before they've landed, but I think that on the basis of this work alone, we can easily classify this summer a success. Huge thanks, of course, to Brian Skinner for his patient and thoughtful work in shepherding of the entire program.