Welcome to Dojomino
Category Introduction Dojo Domino
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Dojomino is a site dedicated to the implementation of the open source javascript framework Dojo for the Domino platform. We'll focus on providing insight, tutorials, code samples, and a place on the web to talk about Domino and Dojo. The blog site will be primarily authored by Lance Spellman of Workflow Studios, but there are some good potential guest authors out there that will hopefully contribute.
Bookmark :
Dojomino is a site dedicated to the implementation of the open source javascript framework Dojo for the Domino platform. We'll focus on providing insight, tutorials, code samples, and a place on the web to talk about Domino and Dojo. The blog site will be primarily authored by Lance Spellman of Workflow Studios, but there are some good potential guest authors out there that will hopefully contribute.
So why Dojo? Dojo appeals to me on many levels...
- First, it's well constructed. It has the feel of an object-oriented framework much like Java with everything wrapped as objects, and declared in its own namespace
- It has a nice AJAX implementation, and handles cross-browser issues well for everything it does.
- It avoids the function collision issues that some people have run into with prototype-based libraries
- From what I've read it does not suffer from the memory leaks that underlie prototype-based development
- IBM has "bought-in" to Dojo with their announcement in June, 2006 of their participation in the project. They've already incorporated Dojo in the upcoming Quickr release, and it's only expected to spread through other product offerings
- The construction of a Dojo widget (a UI element) is based on creating an HTML template fragment (where needed), a CSS file, and a JS file that captures the functionality of the widget. This feels more natural for web development than say a JSF approach where you're basically building the layout in another language than where it will be delivered (browser). The architecture also allows you to build non-html templates as well, so it's not restricted to just browser usage.
- It's big...but in a good way. A lot of things have been built already, and it should only get better with IBM's involvement. It has an intelligent load and build system that allows the developer to let the dojo framework bring in additional files a single page might need. It uses Ant as a build tool for developers who want to analyze the required files for a page/system and then build a custom dojo.js that includes just those files. It uses compression techniques on the final .js file product.
- While there is documentation, it is incomplete in areas and sometimes points you to out of date (deprecated or just no longer working) approaches.
- While there is an extensive widget library, in most cases they are not as "sexy" as widgets from other libraries like YUI.
What's next?
I plan to do a quick series of tutorials.
- How to get Dojo downloaded into your Domino environment
- A HelloDojo sample
- How to turn HTML elements (like fields) into Dojo widgets, things like email and phone fields and AJAX data-driven ComboBoxes
