The Dojo Toolkit in Practice

The article discusses a piece of a project that uses Ajax to create a responsive itinerary viewer. The article was just updated for the latest Dojo 0.3 release.

Introduction

When you start to build an Ajax application, you quickly run into situations where you feel like you are reinventing the wheel. The XMLHttpRequest object is what a lot of developers jump on when they think about Ajax, but that is just the start, and is the easy part.

There are lots of annoyances when you build JavaScript rich applications. Browser compatibility and degradation, messing with the DOM, and dealing with bleeding edge hacks such as offline storage all come up.

This article is going to introduce you to a toolkit that is much more than an XHR wrapper. It is the type of toolkit that everyone should be using if they are developing a rich Ajax application. Without it, you are a crippled developer.

Rather than listing out the APIs available in The Dojo Toolkit, we will look at a simple slice of an application, to see parts and pieces of the library in action.

We will discuss:

* What this Dojo thing is?
* Setting up Dojo
* DOM and HTML Effects in practice
* Ajax remote calls via dojo.io.bind()
* Drag and Drop operations

Posted by: MiracleStudios.us