Dojo 0.9: A new, leaner, meaner Dojo
Written by on April 30th, 2007 in Ajax News.
There has been a ton of work going on over in Dojo land, and Alex has given his hands a rest from coding, to give us an update on Dojo 0.9 over at SitePen HQ.
It is wrong to think of Dojo as an Ajax toolkit. It is more akin to a stdlib for JavaScript, as it is so many modules that are very broad indeed.
That being said, there has been a push to make Dojo even more pragmatic, lean, and fast. It is great to see the new course of action:
Early this year it became clear that for folks building Dojo apps, the question of “what is Dojo?” was becoming increasingly hard to answer. Each individual user might be working with a different subset and therefore they don’t share a common definition, which makes sharing what you know about the system harder than it needs to be.
In response, we’re in the middle of a huge undertaking: rethink the entire API surface area of Dojo from the ground up and split it up into 3 different top-level projects. With R&D dollars and time coming from all corners of the Dojo universe, 0.9 is shaping up to be smaller, faster, more coherent, and easier to understand.
What this means is:
- Dojo Base: This new core is aiming at 50k (< 20k gz), and will contain “things like dojo.query(), dojo.connect(), the package system, style and DOM manipulation functions, ajax, and a small-but-flexible animation system.” An important change is that there will be only one dojo.js per version, unlike now, where you can build your own dojo.js files, or choose a set packaged version.
- Dijit: The new widget system will be its own package. “The Dijit team is working on a set of consistent, themed, localized, and accessible widgets that not only improve on the usability of the existing widget set, but will also provide huge performance improvements in declaring and constructing widgets in a page.”
The Dojo team is already seeing fruits of their labors with performance improvements, even before they have done the final tweaks.
In the future, I hope for a world where a lot of these libraries will Just Be There, so you won’t have to have the same size worries, and instead we will be able to focus on speed, and other issues. When you look at most popular libraries, the reason they are popular is often to do with the libraries that you have access too (e.g. CPAN).
Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/dojo-09-a-new-leaner-meaner-dojo