They should also seriously consider creating a page (easily found from the top-level page) of “here’s where it’s used” links and screenshots, to really get people thinking not just about “well, what can you do”, but “who’s using it?”

also, not an advice for everyone, but if you checkout the dojo core, or some tiny widgets, you ll appreciate how cross-browser written it is. i ve touched some points, re-written some widgets for my app. it s even better for me.

again, imho , jquery is fine, prototype is cool i love all of em. they may be faster also.

but dojo is a package. it s solid, runs in opera even in safari(well i know the editor2 ), you can re-compress the source online , after using the mighty shrinksafe(it rules). i m using many widgets on my app, so does imeem.com if you checkout. but, finally i agree that dojo is not for all. not for the moment at least.

I have tried all the frameworks, and have had the pleasure of building a full fledged JS app.The Dojo ppl simply try to make good code in my opinion. It IS loading only the minimum bytes needed ON DEMAND, supporting DEBUG mode. It supports all mechanisms that I want as an evolved programmer (mixins, inheritance etc). It’s event mechanism is THE ONLY ONE for me.

In my opinion YUI is somewhere in the middle of hardcore JS coders and JS newbies trying to hack something fast. I think they’re appeasing to ppl who like swing and such, doing things the programmatic way. Dojo provides for extendible markup, so it becomes the CONFIGURATION for your application. Simply have your html/css experts hack together a demo for your customers and add behaviour/ajax afterwards. Time to market improves drastically.

Just take what you want from it, when you want it, without the overhead :)

Alright, some critique I have too:
- I must say that I prefer Dean Edward’s Base class over Dojo’s inheritance scheme, but only because it’s too defferent from the way programmers are used to do inheritance.
- I also prefer Dean’s css-query, for it abides to standards and supports css2 and css2.

Mukul.

i’ll be watching with interest to see how dojo 0.9 goes … such a shame you guys didn’t address this at an earlier stage, cause the last 3-4 months is when all the frameworks really took off.

If you do not like downloading and unpacking Dojo on your drive, you can use the Dojo 0.9 beta from the AOL CDN. Just add a script tag and start experimenting. The xdomain 0.9 Dojo core served from the CDN is just 26KB gzipped too.

I definitely feel that pain on the lack of documentation and not having the API tool updated yet. I understand it is in the works, so hopefully that will get fleshed out sooner rather than later.

@John: please don’t hesistate to go the Dojo Forums and post that comment in a big way. More people that work on Dojo pay attention there than they do here.

@Vance: tell me about it :)

@rip747: You are always entitled to your own personal preferences. But don’t make a judgement like “sounds like desperation” when you don’t know anything about what went on internally with the Dojo group. We heard all of the complaints, we took a step back–and a very long, hard look–and finally we had the example of Firefox as inspiration. In short, we responded to the complaints. The problem (as I see it) is that we didn’t respond instantly, and while that’s a problem it’s also inevitable that it takes a while to turn a project around as radically as we did. If you felt that we pushed you away, we’re sorry about that–but we’re all volunteers and can’t respond to everyone and everything that someone says instantly (though I’d admit that some of us try, usually to the detriment of the project).

It just seemed the most polished. The docs are great. That is more important than people realize. I want to get it working, tell me how, fast, and give me examples. YUI does this. Feature wise all of these guys have useful stuff so no real winner. YUI also is organized very well. Dojo was a close second though. And we aren’t opposed to using other libs on a case by case bases.

The one thing that I never did like about Dojo was the fact that it was soooooo bloated. I like jQuery because it extremely small and I can extend it with the plugins that I need to get the job done.

This entire post for the Dojo camp sounds like desperation in my book to win back people since they pushed them away. Pathetic.

Best,
Brad Neuberg