Dojo Findings

Develop lightweight mobile web applications with Dojo Mobile

2011-11-28T13:49:00.001-05:00

" Dojo Mobile is a Dojo-based widget set for creating mobile web applications. With Dojo Mobile, you can develop lightweight, high-performance mobile web applications. In this article, learn how Dojo Mobile addresses the performance issues, and how you can optimize Dojo Mobile-based user applications to make them as small and efficient as possible."
With the mobile web growing worldwide isn't it time you took a look at Dojo Mobile? This IBM article by Yoshiroh Kamiyama introduces creating mobile sites using the newer Dojo Mobile features that can get you off to a good start. Dojo has been known to be a bit cumbersome in the past. This article shows you that it is possible to get something great up and running without overburdening your users phone. A great article!
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/mo-dojo-mobile-performance/index.html

Firebug Now Has A Dojo Helper - The Dojo Firebug Extension

2011-10-22T22:38:00.001-04:00

Everyone in the dojo community have two developers from IBM Argentina, Patricio Reyna Almandos and Fernando Gomez, to thank for writing and releasing it. The Dojo Firebug Extension looks like it will be a great help to any Dojo application developer. It doesn’t work in separate window mode though – so its back to the tall bottom div for me. Just the same, I think its a great contribution to the Dojo community. Before you go searching through the Firefox site you may want to check out the information page at: http://getfirebug.com/wiki/index.php/DojoFirebugExtension_Reference_Guide to get the complete overview (it was just updated yesterday).

no functionality in firebug 1.5
limited functionality in firebug 1.6 (so no old firefox)
no separate window functionality

Still, if you can overlook these three shortcomings you’re in business. So far it has worked well for me on openSuSE 11.4 and Windows.

muchas gracias!

Dojo Package Loading Hacks and Best Practices

2011-05-08T00:54:00.000-04:00

A thorough understanding of how the Dojo toolkit loads up the dependencies you're using inside your page is essential to anyone scripting with it. This blog article written by Michael Woloszynowicz covers some of the advanced practices you may need to use in your object oriented Dojo code. He explains, in detail, exactly how Dojo loads up your code and the different ways to get around that initial "load crawl" that occurs in larger Dojo pages. A great article!

http://www.w2lessons.com/2011/04/dojo-package-loading-hacks-and-best.html

Custom Dijit Best Practises

2011-05-05T16:45:00.000-04:00

If you are thinking about creating your own custom Dijit for use within Dojo and you're just starting out you can probably use all the help you can get. That's what these two articles written by Andrew Ferrier and Tom Dye are all about. Keep in mind that they are tagged as a "work in progress" though. Just the same, there is some very valuable info contained in these posts that can help you understand some of the the quirks and pitfalls you may come across while authoring your custom widget.
http://dojotipsntricks.com/2011/04/23/custom-dijit-best-practises-part-1/
http://dojotipsntricks.com/2011/04/23/custom-dijit-best-practises-part-2/

Learning dojox.mobile with The TweetView Series

2011-04-18T16:31:00.001-04:00

Mobile web applications is the next big thing as far as web scripting is concerned. While we are all scrambling to get up to date with the various mobile web frameworks such as iUi and Wink (or I have been at least), David Walsh and the good people over at dojotoolkit.org are hosting a new multipart series of tutorials about using the dojox.mobile branch. I’ve always enjoyed reading David Walsh’s tutorials and these newest tutorials are sure to be informative as well as instructive. There are four parts written so far with “more to follow” promised. The series starts with the link below.

http://dojotoolkit.org/documentation/tutorials/1.6/mobile/tweetview/getting_started/

New community tutorials are up at dojotoolkit.org

2011-03-29T20:51:00.001-04:00

With the new 1.6 version of Dojo comes new tutorials that we can all appreciate. Dojo contributors Sam Foster and Bryan Forbes from over at sitepoint.com along with David Walsh have kicked off the new community documentation with some really great tutorials for the new Dojo version that will pretty much get anyone started writing Dojo javascript.

At the time of this writing there are ten tutorials up on the site, with eight of them aimed at beginning dojo coding. The number of tutorials are sure to grow as the dojotoolkit site is promising “a few new tutorials every week” – which is great!. So far, the tutorials basically take the reader from the industry standard “Hello World” all the way up to the intermediate subject of Dojo deferreds.

If you have ever been curious about the dojo toolkit in the past this is a great way to get started without breaking the bank. From what I’ve read, every single tutorial is well written and straight to the point with excellent explanations and code examples.

I would list all of them but the list would be outdated in a week. Your best bet is to go to dojotoolkit.org and hit the Documentation link in the menu bar to get started.

http://dojotoolkit.org/documentation/

Unified codebases with Dojo, Node, and RequireJS

2011-03-03T23:14:00.000-05:00

"In order to run a single codebase application using Dojo, RequireJS, and Node, you really only need 4 special things (and they really aren’t that special):

A stub HTML file that loads RequireJS (index.html)
A shell script that invokes Node with RequireJS (server.sh)
A stub script that configures RequireJS for each environment and loads your main application code (js/my/_base.js)
Some sort of logic within your application that branches depending upon the environment for any modules that need to load only in one place or the other (js/my/app.js)"

Here's an article for those of us seeking to develop in nothing but Dojo JavaScript (client, server - everything). Sweet.

http://zetafleet.com/blog/unified-codebases-with-dojo-node-and-requirejs-the-holy-grail-of-dry

Asynchronous Modules Come to Dojo 1.6

2011-02-21T18:46:00.000-05:00

"Dojo (core) and Dijit 1.6 have been refactored to follow the proposed CommonJS AMD API."
This article brought to you by Sitepoint.com and Kris Zyp will get you up to speed on using the new asynchronous module loading techniques used in the newest Dojo release. One of the biggest reasons behind using the asynchronous loading feature is that it can make your Dojo module dependencies load a bit faster. Discover how to get your Dojo code up and running using the AMD format coupled with Dojo's synch loader; or couple it to use RequireJS or Backdraft loaders instead. In any case, this article should get you up and running with this new feature.

http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2011/02/14/asynchronous-modules-come-to-dojo-1-6/

Dojo Object Stores

2011-02-21T18:17:00.000-05:00

One of the more important changes in the Dojo Toolkit 1.6 is the new data store API called Object Stores. This article written by Kris Zyp and provided by Sitepoint.com not only gives you a nice introduction to these important changes and features, it gives you a jump start on using the new API by providing usage examples and explanations that are clear and concise.

A great read if you use the data API and are planning to update your project to 1.6.

http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2011/02/15/dojo-object-stores/

Collection of 37 Basic Dojo Tutorials

2011-02-06T21:06:00.000-05:00

"Dojo is another great framework for developing ajax based applications. Dojo is selected by Struts 2 for providing ajax support in applications. Dojo is one of the most powerful language for constructing rich internet applications. In this Dojo tutorials you will find everything about Dojo."

Here's another great collection of basic Dojo tutorials to get you started hosted on RoseIndia. This assortment of articles are a great way to get started using Dojo in your Struts programs. Granted, the emphasis on Java server side code may discourage some, but most will be able to abstract that away and learn from them anyway. Covers the basics all the way up to using all of the common Dijits (Dojo Widgets).

http://www.roseindia.net/dojo/

Dojo 1.6 Beta 1 Was Released January 16 and the Full Release is Due in February

2011-01-28T19:57:00.000-05:00

Dojo announced the beta release of version 1.6 on their website on January 16 . The full version is coming in February sometime. The release notes describe all of the changes and are located here. With this release there are more than a couple of changes that will effect the way you write your Dojo JavaScript code. Here are a few notable changes worth mentioning right away:
Probably the most prominent change that you will notice is the dgConfig option used to define your runtime parameters has been depreciated. Instead of using the djConfig='parseOnLoad:true' you must use data-dojo-conjig=”parseOnLoad:true' instead to configure your Dojo runtime options inside the script tag. Inside of your script, the djConfig object variable is changed to dojoConfig and is no longer global (thus, you must define it with var in other words).
Another big change is in Base's module definitions. Dojo is adopting the AMD format that requirejs uses for module definitions. Although many modules in Dojo are already redefined to this format, the release docs states that this part of the toolkit is still a bit fragile and still being worked on. Everything is still backwards compatible though.
Themes are different in the new version. Styles in Dojo's css files have been converted to less format to make creating custom themes easier. This welcomed change makes creating a custom style as easy as changing some settings and variables in the dijit/themes/claro/variables.css file.
Basically, there are sweeping changes and additions to the toolkit in this new upcoming release. I only mentioned a couple that stand out to me in this miniscule post. I suggest going over the release notes carefully to discover changes that may effect your coding. Happy JavaScripting!

Release Announcement - http://dojotoolkit.org/blog/dojo-1-6-beta-1
Get the Beta Release Here - http://download.dojotoolkit.org/release-1.6.0b1/
Dojo 1.6 Release Notes - http://docs.dojocampus.org/releasenotes/1.6
RequireJS API Docs (for understanding the module system) - http://requirejs.org/docs/api.html
lesscss site - http://lesscss.org/
Article on using Less - http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/12/06/using-the-less-css-preprocessor-for-smarter-style-sheets/
PDF describing Dojo1.5 asynchronous module conversion from dojo-sie - http://dojo-sie.org/trunk/doc/dojo-module-format-conversion.pdf
dojo-sie - http://dojo-sie.org/index.html

Dojo and TinyMCE – Creating a Widget

2011-01-20T16:52:00.001-05:00

I’m working on a project using Dojo which requires a wysiwyg editor that is more robust than Dojo’s Dijit.Editor. After doing a bit of research, I decided to use TinyMCE. This wysiwyg editor is very robust, has great documentation and is the editor that WordPress uses. Integrating TinyMCE did not appear to be difficult, but I also wanted to create a TinyMCE Dojo widget, so that I could easily reuse TinyMCE in other Dojo projects without having to remember how to set it up.

This tutorial will show you how to tie the TinyMCE text editor component into your Dojo front end code. Les Green has included plenty of code examples to get you started using TinyMCE within your Dojo plumbing code. Good article for those that prefer this integral part of WordPress over the standard Dijit text editor.

http://grasshopperpebbles.com/ajax/dojo-and-tinymce-creating-a-widget/

Dive Into Dojo GFX

2011-01-15T16:35:00.001-05:00

It’s well known that Dojo’s DojoX collection is a treasure trove of enterprise-ready, advanced widgets and JavaScript classes that allow you to accomplish difficult tasks with relative ease. One of DojoX’s most powerful features is GFX.

In this tutorial, David Walsh creates an animation centric London Ajax logo using GFX, the vector drawing portion of Dojo X. This is one of the best tutorial available on getting started with the GFX part of Dojo as it covers all of the basic drawing and animation possibilities that GFX can offer a developer without the fluff. If you are curious about what you can accomplish drawing in your JavaScript (cross browser, of course) this tutorial will give you a head start.

http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2010/12/30/dive-into-dojo-gfx/

Also, you may want to check out the other four tutorials Dave Walsh did in the same Dive Into Dojo series - http://www.sitepen.com/blog/series/dive-into-dojo/

Using the Dojo Toolkit with Microsoft’s WCF

2011-01-13T16:18:00.001-05:00

For .NET developers, the Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is an excellent resource for creating service-based Web applications. Defining web services is relatively easy using WCF; using Visual Studio .NET, you can set up a solution with the interfaces needed for WCF quickly and easily.

Here’s an article for all the Microsoft server-side people on using Dojo within their web apps. This article is geared towards C# programmers but I’m sure it could be applied to any .NET language with enough reverse engineering.

http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2011/01/13/using-the-dojo-toolkit-with-microsofts-wcf/

General Dijit Discussion Video

2011-01-07T16:21:00.001-05:00

Dijit Dojo UI
In this talk speaker Sam Foster talks about Dijit Dojo UI in the London AJAX User Group meetup

A basic overview of Dijit, the Dojo user interface component part of Dojo that consists of a standardized collection of widgets that can be inserted into an html page. Sitepen’s Sam Foster explains the advantages of using Dijit in your web application. Keep in mind that it is an overview discussion, not a step by step tutorial. Goes over much of the complexities and infrastructure of using Dijit in your apps.

http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/ajax-ria/dijit-dojo-ui

Many Comet Solutions for your Real-time Apps

2011-01-03T17:00:00.001-05:00

This sitepen.com article gives you an overview of all the different AJAX push server side options. Taken from the London AJAX User Group mini conference, Dylan Sheimann covers Comet and Server-Side JavaScript options available today in web development. An excellent set of videos that should be viewed by anyone who wants to keep up to date with this relatively new technology.

http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2011/01/03/many-comet-solutions-for-your-real-time-apps/

Introduction to Dojo WebSocket

2011-01-03T16:37:00.001-05:00

The newest API that Dojo is introducing in Dojo 1.6 is the WebSocket API. The WebSocket API will allow web developers to handle real-time communication between the client and the server in a more intuitive way. Real-time pages are the future on the web and sitepen.com and the Dojo Toolkit have been and are changing to suit developers needs. This article will get any Dojo programmer started using the new API and covers it well.

http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2010/10/31/dojo-websocket/

Dojo TreeGrid and Large Data Sets

2010-12-23T15:05:00.001-05:00

The Dojo TreeGrid normally handles sets of data with hundreds of records fairly well. Once your program has to handle thousands of records you will need to customize the display code of your TreeGrid. This 14 page IBM article written by Sheng Hai Xu, Yang Liu, and Jie Hu will take you through the steps necessary to get your front end display code ready for some massive amounts of data.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-dojotreegrid/index.html