Comments on: Dojo Roundup: A/V, Animation, and a lot more

By: Andy Kant

Andy Kant — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:34:52 +0000

@Tom
I have support for require/requireIf in the bridge, but will probably look into a setting for bypassing that. If I have any more questions I will post on the dojo forums, thank you.

By: Tom Trenka

Tom Trenka — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:40:32 +0000

@Andy: understood. If you need any help or direction, feel free to ping us over on the dojo forums (http://dojotoolkit.org/forums) and either Eugene or I can point you in the right direction. One of the key things is the conditional loads for the various renderers, and I’m not sure how you’d want to do that without asking people to include a specific script tag (the package system handles that for us).

By: Andy Kant

Andy Kant — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:05:46 +0000

Just for comparison, the bridge I have written so far (for dojox.gfx only) is 2kb compressed/gzipped, missing dojo.declare/Color/connect functionality.

By: Andy Kant

Andy Kant — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:51:02 +0000

@Tom
I don’t really have any reasons other than wanting to avoid duplicate functionality being downloaded. The other thing I want to avoid is the dynamic package downloading system, but that could be solved by creating a custom build.

By: Tom Trenka

Tom Trenka — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:43:38 +0000

@Dylan: I would too, I was just suggesting a quick fix for the short term without having to dive into the mechanics of dojo.declare :)

By: Dylan Schiemann

Dylan Schiemann — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:20:37 +0000

@Andy: dojo.Color you could probably grab wholesale, and dojo.declare is just a convenient wrapper for inheritance/mixins/instantiations that can be unrolled or mimiced-ed pretty easily.

@Tom: while I’d personally love everyone to use Dojo Core, I think it would be pretty cool to see other toolkits be able to use some of the great stuff in DojoX such as gfx, charting, and grid.

By: Tom Trenka

Tom Trenka — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:37:27 +0000

@Andy
Any reason you might feel compelled to just not use the Dojo core for loading it up and using it? It’s not a knock on Moo or a lack of desire to see a port, but just from an expediency standpoint I would think that it wouldn’t be too hard (and shouldn’t create a major conflict) to simply load the Dojo core and consume (philosophy aside)? I suppose that would depend on how anal (no offense intended) you might want to be about downloads…

By: Andy Kant

Andy Kant — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:24:13 +0000

@Dylan
I did a scan of all Dojo Core usage in the dojox.gfx package and have been working on a slim Mootools bridge to see if I can get it to work. There are Mootools equivalents for most of the calls but there are some features that don’t really have any simple equivalents (like dojo.declare and dojo.Color) that need to get included so I’m not sure that its going to gain much in the end anyways. Just wishful thinking I suppose.

By: Dylan Schiemann

Dylan Schiemann — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:07:27 +0000

Andy, without too much work, they could be. They don’t rely on that much Dojo code currently (Dojo base, 23K compress, gzipped), and someone could of course remove the dependencies that are there. You could of course use Dojo and another toolkit in the same app in most cases, though you do spend an extra 23K.

From our perspective, writing a neutral compatibility layer would probably take almost the same amount of code. We could define some standard interfaces I suppose, but at what point is it just easier to rip out what you don’t need and port it, etc.?

By: Andy Kant

Andy Kant — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:54:48 +0000

Definitely some cool technology. I really wish that the excellent vector graphics and charting libraries could be used with other frameworks though ;-).