Many Fixes, Enhancements in Dojo's Release 1.2
by Reuven Lerner - Oct. 07, 2008Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
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Dojo, one of the leading open-source libraries and widget sets for JavaScript programming, released its latest version (1.2) yesterday. Dojo, which is developed by the Dojo Foundation and released under both the BSD License and Academic Free License, is officially integrated with a number of Web development frameworks, such as Django and the Zend Framework, and by vendors such as IBM and Sun Microsystems.
Dojo began in 2004, as a small project that would add DHTML to Web applications being created by Alex Russell, David Schontzler, and Dylan Schiemann at software company Informatica. The project quickly became popular among programmers outside of Informatica, who were beginning to understand that a portable JavaScript library will make Web development better for both programmers and users. Today, Dojo provides support not only for easier JavaScript development, but also for a variety of things that client-side Web developers need.
Dojo comes with a large number of "widgets," objects with pre-packaged functionality that can be inserted into Web pages and customized, but whose core functions have been tested on many sites. Thus, a developer interested in adding a pull-down menu to his or her site can use a Dojo menu, rather than create menus from a combination of raw HTML and CSS. Dojo similarly provides widgets for tabs and tooltips, as well as for displaying trees and laying out pages using grids.
Like YUI, the Yahoo library for JavaScript and Ajax programming, Dojo provides a very wide variety of functions. It offers a number of visual effects, a rich text editor, and drag-and-drop support. It even offers "Dijit," a library for serving visually impaired users with a reasonable Web experience. It also provides both client-side and server-side storage options, working with a variety of server-side implementations. This contrasts with such libraries as Prototype/Scriptaculous, which compete with some of Dojo's core functionality, but leave higher-level widgets and storage solutions to third parties.
One potential problem with such a rich toolkit is its size. Dojo offers several solutions to this problem. The first is a packaging system that makes it possible to load only those components that are truly necessary on the current page. In addition, Dojo is available via Google's libraries API download site, allowing Dojo to be downloaded quickly (thanks to the speed of Google's servers), and to be loaded only once across numerous applications.
A great deal of information about Dojo is available online. Two books were recently published about the toolkit, and might be of use to aspiring Dojo users. One, "Dojo: The Definitive Guide," was written by Matthew Russell and published by O'Reilly Media. The second, "Mastering Dojo," was written by Rawld Gill, Craig Riecke, and Alex Russell (the founder of the Dojo project, and president of the Dojo Foundation), and published by the Pragmatic Programmers.
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