jpsykes

This morning at 3am Alex tagged the Dojo 1.0 release. This is the culmination of 3+ years of effort for the Dojo Foundation members, the contributors and the general Dojo user base who have helped the Toolkit become what I would consider the premier JavaScript toolkit for soup-to-nuts development. I say soup-to-nuts, because although there are other toolkits that might be smaller, or “easier” to add widgets, or have closer ties to the backend, there is no toolkit that competes at every stage of the development process as consistently as Dojo can.

The change between 0.4.3 and 1.0 is night and day, but as I’ve said before, “it’s all strangely familiar”, it still is. In fact what is most interesting is the volume of work done between 0.9 and 1.0 yet the porting docs for that jump are actually rather small and very specific in nature. Another nod to some solid work that went into 0.9.

At work, we held off using 0.9 for production, working on the assumption that 0.9 was really the 0.1 version of New Dojo™ and I think that was a good call, there are considerable stability increases from 0.9 and hell there’s a Grid now. :-)

But it’s not just any Grid.

Yes it was inherited from the Turbo Ajax guys - who have been very diligently working with the Dojo team (in fact most of the TA guys are major Dojo contributors) to convert it across to look and feel more like a Dojo Certified Grid widget.

But it doesn’t just stop there, this is not just the Grid ported to the newer Dijit system, it comes with some NEW features that really make it stand apart from many javascript Grids. The main one, is the fact that you can now bind a Grid to a Dojo Data Store, this means you can rely on the Data Store to do any “Data” related work, and the Grid focuses on being a Grid.

It’s like Front End middle ware. Now you don’t need to worry about having your grids do any server side communication or data management or sorting or editing, that is all handled by the Data Store object, this makes it fast and light weight.

As Alex said this morning over IM…

*that’s* 1.0 in my mind

It’s clearly something he’s very excited about - and I know from the flurry of svn commits, it’s something he’s personally been very involved in.

JavaScript aside, expect some substantial changes from the Dojo team in the next few weeks and months.

The site is about to make a huge change to a brand new design, layout and architecture, which I think is amazing.

The documentation is just getting better and better, from the buzz on the contributors lists, it seems there is now a small army of documentation experts on the project, so I’m confident that the 1.0 documentation will be A1 in the next few months.

Moving forward, I think the next 6-12 months will see some exciting changes to the peripherals of the Toolkit. I don’t think Core, Base and Dijits won’t change hugely, but I think a lot of attention will switch to the DojoX part of the toolkit and we’ll see some very interesting extensions coming out. Some serious evolution is in store, I think.

Anyway, enough of me sounding like a total Dojo fanboy, here is the rest of the new features.

• Accessibility including keyboard navigation, low vision support, and ARIA markup for assistive technologies
• High performance grid widget supporting 100,000+ rows of data
• Browser-native 2-D and 3-D charting
• A full library of easy-to-use, attractive UI controls
• Universal data access for simple and fast data-driven widget development
• Internationalization with localizations provided for 13 major languages
• CSS-driven themes to make customization and extension simple
• Dojo Offline, based on Google Gears, which makes offline applications easy to build
• Support for the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits
• Native 2-D and 3-D vector graphics drawing
• Access to many more widgets and extensions through the Dojo package system

Congratulations to everyone that made this possible, you should all be very proud of what you’ve accomplished.