Ajax Girl

Dojo 0.9 has been released in beta. This is a brand new Dojo, and a very exciting time for the project:

SPEED: Stripped of all ‘excessive’, redundant, and backwards-compatible code, the new Dojo core is a speed-demon. It consists of a streamlined, compact Base (aka: dojo.js) which provides a plethora of reliable features for you and your application to expand upon. Our goal was to keep the new Base under 50K on disk and we’re happy to say that even with the many improvements to it since M2, Dojo Base still clocks in under the wire and gzipped it’s even smaller: 24K. The base of the new widget system (dijit.js) is even lighter, weighing in at 21K on disk and 11K on the wire.

Accessibility: one of the main goals of Dojo’s 1.0 release is accessibility. We want to put the power to build great web applications in everyone’s hands, and that means applications that are also great for everyone. Dijit (the dojo widget system) is striving to make all aspects of the Dojo Toolkit accessible via keyboard navigation, accommodate screen readers, and work in high-contrast mode for visually impared users, while still maintaining its elegant and customizable structure. Much of that work is already done as of Beta and it shows. Try tabbing around the examples on IE or FF and you’ll see how a focus on a11y makes the components we provide better. Again, our heartfelt thanks to Mozilla and IBM as well as David, Simon and Becka11y (the a11y team) for their continued efforts on everyone’s behalf.

Theming: Dijit is entirely customizable. Shipping with a default theme named ‘Tundra’, a structure has been established with which to create your own personalized sytle of Dojo, on a per-page or per-node or per-widget basis. All dijit look and feel is CSS-based, and easily extendable. Look at any of the Dijit examples and you’ll see that there’s no magic about how the CSS gets loaded or applied. Want to provide your own theme? Just create an allegory to tundra.css and you’re off to the races!

Documentation: a new version of our venerable web-based/html API tool is is in the works. Following a strict style guide, and documentation standards, we’re working hard to make Toolkit code nearly self-explanitory. Where it’s not, the new API system supports in-place updates of the documentation via the web interface and comments on any node so that you can share your experiences, common usage patterns, and frustrations about any API with yourself and your fellow Dojo developers. We expect this new tool to be integrated with the main Dojotoolkit.org

I am excited to see what comes out of this. Great jobs guys, and kudos for being ballsy enough to make this change.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/130168950/dojo-09-the-next-generation-is-here