Monday, April 16th, 2007
Dojo Widgets Rebirth
Category: Dojo
Dojo is getting some big changes. One of them is a change in the widget structure.
The Dojo folk just updated us on the status of Dijit, the new system.
To get an idea of what is going on, check out this PDF that gives you what you need to know:
Dijit looks cleaner and simpler, and you can tell it is nice to be away from the baggage of cross-support of HTML and SVG/VML.
A lot of work is being put into a standard look and feel that is nice out of the box too, Tundra. We are in a visual world, and you could have great technical widgets, but the user doesn’t see the code.
So, get up to speed on the new way to dojoType.
3.8 rating from 29 votes
I hope they will made it lighter, because current Dojo library it’s too fat & bloated, I think. I’m looking forward to see it at work. Thanks.
@wiredb: if the toolkit is too “fat and bloated” for you, then learn to bootstrap specific sections to save yourself space, time and sanity.
e.g. dojo.require(”dojo.flash.*”);
If you start importing subsections of the toolkit, you’ll also gather a better understanding of the API and force yourself to dig deeper into the toolkit itself (arguably making yourself a more efficient dojo coder)
Treat it as you would a simple Java program. If you’re going to create a prog on the fly to spit out random words, all you’ll need is java.lang.string and java.io. If you include java.lang.* instead, then you’re subjecting yourself to unnecessary bloat by being impractical with what you include.
If, instead, you want the developers of *whichever* toolkit to handle these imports for you, it will substantially decrease the amount of freedom and power of the API, as well as force all loading optimizations onto the developers.
A suggestion for anyone using dojo right now and are worried about it being too “fat” or don’t like how long it takes to load, get familiar with the build system. I’ve written very specific build profiles for my sites and the speed improvement over dynamic loading is incredible. I even made a few modifications to the build system that let me build additional files that only contain parts that I require on specific pages. I now have pages loading in under a second that used to take around 10 seconds.
Or you could use another JS framework without all that hassle. Doesn’t mooTools or Ext provide widget support?
Well my suggestion was for people already using Dojo, easier to do some simple optimizations than completely rewrite everything for a different framework.
Has any one used Dojo in a real world business application with acceptable performance, and where the common developer can code and maintain the system?
One of the keys to success of any framework is ease of use and maintainability.
In my case…
Real world business application with acceptable performance? Yes.
Common developer can code and maintain? Probably not.
The second part is really my fault, not necessarily Dojo’s.