jpsykes

Jim Barraud just showed me something that’s really rather cool that he found after reading a Zeldman post. The Apple Store is now using Dojo as their main JS toolkit.

This is awesome news for the toolkit on so many levels.

Justification for them

It’s an additional reason that I can give to non technical folks when we recommend Dojo for a project. We tend to find that if people are presented with a proposal or option for a tool to use that they don’t fully understand, the first impulse is to see who else is using it. Am I keeping up with the Jones, or is no one else doing this.

So who else is using Dojo?

Up until now, the main response was to detail AOL’s extensive involvement in Dojo and that they use it for all their newer rich UI’s, a side from that you’re somewhat left with a list of “web 2.0″ and “fringe” sites, that Mr. Finance Director has probably never heard of. Now being able to say Apple use it in their web store, is an awesome addition.

Reinforcement for me

Maybe I’m fickle (thankfully not as fickle as Jim .-) but I often find I’m double guessing myself. Maybe we should be using a different toolkit? Maybe the time I’m investing in Dojo should be invested in jQuery or Moo? Maybe I have no idea what’s going on and I’m a total lost wreck of a man? Then you see that others are doing the same sort of things, and you find yourself feeling a little more confident that maybe you did make the right decision.

Apple is a little slow

I’m fascinated to know if there is a reason that Apple are using 0.4.0 release, rather than 0.4.3. I’m curious if there is a technical or business driven reason for this. From what I remember from a year ago, 0.4.0 had quite a few bugs that were fixed in the 0.4.1 release, then improved and refined in the 0.4.2 and 0.4.3 versions.

The Apple Touches

It’s also interesting to see that Apple have taken the same approach that AOL did, and that we do at work for all of our Dojo implementations, of extending and tweaking the toolkit for their own needs. Apple has a it’s own Namespace and own widgets, and it has some additions to the toolkit (especially around the events area) (almost a hotfix file, only not called that).

Mix and Match

Of course Dojo isn’t the only JS library that gets a mention, there are a dozen or so Prototype “Function” extensions in the files as well, which again is a good sign, it shows that these libraries can live somewhat together, finding a single solution isn’t often the best approach, but mix and match is a good way to go sometimes.

Does it work in Safari

It’ll take further investigation, but I would be curious to see if any of the fixes or extensions are there to address any of the Safari support issues that the dojo toolkit all JS library folks are plagued by. There was always huge debate with regard to what level of Safari support you needed to provide, and how much return on investment was there considering how hard it is to debug in Safari 2 and how small a potential market sector it is.

Assuming that the Apple Store needs 100% safari support for all Rich UI features, I’m curious to see if any of Apples code will make it’s way back into the library to help the “community” increase their Safari support potential.