GIS Dashboard Replication with STRATUS RIA tools / DOJO (1)

Just finished 1/2 day #1. Spent the morning setting up the development environment and running through some basic DOJO tutorials. Achieved the following:

• Downloaded and installed Apanta Web onto Windows XP (http://www.apanta.org). This is a free development tool that comes with a DOJO plugin that makes life easier.
• Downloaded and installed FireFox (http://www.mozilla.org). I am reliably informed that you have to pay for a debugger that works with IE; the FireFox one is (of course) free.
• Set up a new project in Apanta. If you create a default web project then it asks you if you want to add the reference to DOJO. Learned how to add files, set the start page, that sort of thing.
• Worked through a series of DOJO tutorials at http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2009/10/30/why-dojo/#more-770 that show off some of the cool stuff you can do pretty easily. They all eventually compiled and worked.

There was a bit of post - install jiggery pokery for Apanta; you have to download and install the DOJO plug in, set the proxy properly so that it can connect to the web (for some reason it didn't like the new proxy we have installed) and set up a debug environment that defaults to FF and not IE. But after a mornings' work I'm good to go.