Ajax Girl

jMaki Actions are a declarative way of associating widget behavior. The goal here is a holy grails of grabbing a Dojo widgets and a Prototype based one, and having them talk together.

Greg shows an example:

Consider a case where you have a Dojo Fisheye and you simply want it to select a tab or URL when an item is clicked. The Dojo Fisheye is in essence provides the same behavior as a menu. You may notice that the models for the Fisheye Model and the jMaki Menu Model are very similar.”

jMaki models uses general conventions for behaviors and properties you can easily swap widgets. For example you could easily use a Dojo Tabbed View or even swap the FishEye for a menu or tree widget.

jMaki actions are great for general interactions like this and makes it really easy to do basic things like this. More advanced interactions should still be done in glue code as described in Widgets talking to Widgets.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/138780449/jmaki-actions-communicating-between-toolkits