

Dojo Toolkit 1.7 Released. - tizoc
http://dojotoolkit.org/blog/dojo-1-7-released

======
vyrotek
Fantastic! I'm literally working right now on a large application that uses
Dojo 1.6 extensively. I must say that I'm overall impressed with the
framework. The selection and flexibility of the widgets is great. I've done
plenty of jQuery UI in the past and I'm honestly done with it until they get
some consistency issues resolved. Dojo definitely fills a need.

But, I wish Dojo was still a bit more straightforward to package up the
various modules/widgets our project is using into a single .js file. For now
the dynamic parsing with dojo.require works fine. But as the project grows it
won't cut it anymore.

Congrats to the team :) (PS. When can we expect it to be available through the
Googel CDN?)

~~~
hughw
Havre you looked into the dojo build system? That's how you make your single
minified js file. Pretty straightforward, I think?
<http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/build/>

~~~
vyrotek
Yep, but sadly I've made a few attempts and failed miserably.

Perhaps I'm too spoiled by jQuery UI Builder. I'd much rather prefer something
like this where I can just pick the widgets I know I'm using:
<http://jqueryui.com/download>

~~~
dylanks2
<http://build.dojotoolkit.org/> should soon be updated for 1.7. The CDN will
be available asap.

~~~
vyrotek
Wow, thank you! How did I miss this? You have no idea how happy this made me.

------
snowwindwaves
An app I use is still on dojo 0.4 because they rewrote the tree widget after
0.6 and the new implementation was missing features we depended on, I think it
was different icons for leafs. Maybe time for an update now

------
DrCatbox
And not a single fuck was given.

Does anyone actually think dojo has a future compared to the power that jquery
gives to make your own "widgets" but far simpler than dojo?

The simplest tutorials in the dojo documentation put html tags in the
JavaScript code. Generating them like strings. It reminds me of the days when
people would generate html (and javascript, oh god) using Java.

Dojo is too big, too complicated and bloated. It should be split up/down in
all its major components.

~~~
dmethvin
> Does anyone actually think dojo has a future compared to the power that
> jquery gives to make your own "widgets" but far simpler than dojo?

It really depends on what you're trying to do, I suspect. I'm on the jQuery
core team and it's nice to have a lot of people building off our work.

> The simplest tutorials in the dojo documentation put html tags in the
> JavaScript code. Generating them like strings.

Yes, simple documentation examples often have HTML in them, the jQuery docs do
it too at times. It's a lot harder to build real examples without all the
extra stuff getting in the way of the simple concept you're trying to
demonstrate.

Go into your browser's debugger and look at how many apps (including jQuery-
based ones) are written. They use MVC frameworks but then create big chunks of
HTML in JavaScript to generate the views rather than using templates. Here's
one for example, from a very large newspaper site:
<http://i.imgur.com/a4R6I.png>

Are you saying that jQuery is to blame for this app using embedded HTML, since
we sometimes use it in our demonstrations for the docs?

> Dojo is too big, too complicated and bloated. It should be split up/down in
> all its major components.

Waitaminit, I thought _jQuery_ was too complicated and bloated, at least
that's what several people here were telling me when I posted the announcement
here about jQuery 1.7 being released.

Most likely a big app needs darn near _every byte_ of the base library it
includes. Go over and look at the Mootools configurable download builder and
tell me which of those checkboxes you could leave empty on a big project. Many
of these big apps are more than half a megabyte of minified code. All of
jQuery is about 92KB and Dojo is 100KB. I have seen the other 400+KB, and _it_
is the problem.

Just like programming languages, libraries can be used improperly. Don't blame
the library for the people who misuse it.

~~~
ColdAsIce
Most apps I worked on required only querying and events. Animations can be
done with css3, but if we wherent working with html5 then simple fadein/out
animations are also required.

Specifically dojo has this useless dijit widget collection. For any serious
web app I doubt you would find dijit suitable to exactly your needs. Which
means you have to develop your own using the query/animation/events api.

~~~
lobo_tuerto
"Most apps I worked on required only querying and events."

Well, that's not really quite the background to call the dojo widgets useless.
They are a really useful set of _programmable_ widgets.

Aye, they _might_ appear to be useless to developers used to cut & paste, but
if you delve a little deeper you will discover a world of useful UI widgets
that can fulfill most of your needs for rich web applications.

If your needs aren't fulfilled with the provided widgets you can always make
your own or modify the existing ones with the tools provided, that I must say
are great at it.

~~~
ColdAsIce
Because there is really no need for the widgets dojo provides. In every
project where a widget kind of thing was required - the requirement also
included it to be developed in house, exactly suited to our needs. If we would
have chosen dojo widgets we would have had to alter them heavily to do what we
want, the way we want it, the way it fits with our codebase. We did that once
though, and learned not do try that again.

How is using dojo widgets not "cut and paste"? Thats exactly what cut and
paste is, all the jQuery stuff we develop is our own, not cut and pasted. If
we really wanted to use dojo widgets, some in the team would have to dig deep
into dijit, which makes the whole thing useless since they might as well
develop their own "widgets" using jquery in less time, and less maintenence,
and less dependency on yet another abstraction/library.

