Dojo

I’m at the Barcamp event in Auckland.

The first session I attended was by Rob Coup who is one of the contributing developers to The Dojo Toolkit.

Dojo is a Javascript development toolkit along the lines of JQuery, Prototype etc. This one is open source but commercially funded by a few companies including Sun and so has 8 full time developers in addition to the community. This will become the Sun preferred framework so will no doubt get adopted by a large number of Java developers.

It has a very strong focus on usability and accessibility, which means that if you have a browser that supports it, you will get all the whizzy features, but if you don’t, everything works. In web development, we refer to this as "degrading gracefully".

We’ve recently just done another review of the major frameworks and AJAX toolkits and Dojo wasn’t one we identified. It seems that their data grid is actually very good but won’t be part of the core release until about February. This is probably too late for a project I have in mind for this, but I would like to revisit in the New Year as I see a number of advantages.

They also claim to be able to work well with other frameworks, which is important.