The Dojo toolkit is a modular open source JavaScript toolkit, designed to ease the rapid development of JavaScript-based applications in a number of environments. It is dual-licensed, and may be obtained under the terms of either the BSD License or the Academic Free License. Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... JavaScript is the name of Netscape Communications Corporations implementation of the ECMAScript standard, a scripting language based on the concept of prototype-based programming. ... This page meets Wikipedias criteria for speedy deletion. ... The BSD license is a permissive license and is one of the most widely used free software licenses. ... The Academic Free License is an open source / free software license written in 2002 by Lawrence E. Rosen, general counsel of the Open Source Initiative. ...

Packaging system

Dojo provides a packaging system designed to ease the separation of functionality into individual packages and sub-packages; the base Dojo "bootstrap" script initializes a hierarchical package namespace called "dojo", and after initialization any Dojo package can be loaded (via XMLHttpRequest or other similar transport) via a utility function. For code developed with Dojo, additional namespaces parallel to "dojo" can be initialized. XMLHttpRequest (XHR) is an API that can be used by JavaScript, JScript, VBScript and other web browser scripting languages to transfer and manipulate XML data to and from a web server using HTTP, establishing an independent connection channel between a web pages Client-Side and Server-Side. ...

Dojo packages can consist of multiple files, and can specify which files constitute the entire package. Any package or file can also specify a dependency on other packages or files, which will be loaded automatically.

Dojo also provides a mechanism for building "profiles"; the build system takes as input a list of packages, and uses Apache Ant to create a single compressed JavaScript file containing those packages and all their dependencies. This allows all necessary code to be loaded and initialized at once, and permits caching of the code (most web browsers do not cache files loaded via XMLHttpRequest). Pre-built "profiles" for some common use cases are available for download from the same location as the full toolkit. Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes. ... Look up cache in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... An example of a web browser (Mozilla Firefox running under Microsoft Windows). ...

Feature highlights

Beyond the packaging system, some of Dojo's more notable features include:

• Workarounds for cross-domain loading of most Dojo packages (though this requires a specialized build of Dojo; one such build is hosted by AOL).
• An event system which allows code to be marked for execution not only on DOM events but on arbitrary events such as calls to a particular function; this enables more robust use of aspect-oriented programming than is typically seen in JavaScript.
• A widget system which allows the creation of complex reusable components, and a number of pre-built widgets (e.g., a calendar-based date selector, a rich text editor, etc.).
• A wrapper around various web browsers' implementations of XMLHttpRequest, which can use a number of transports and data formats and attempts to abstract browser variations as much as possible.
• An animation library, including both pre-built animated effects and facilities for constructing custom animation effects.
• A library of DOM manipulation utilities.
• Utilities for the manipulation of JavaScript classes.
• Abstraction of the execution environment; Dojo provides facilities for detecting and dealing with the differences between web browsers and other JavaScript execution environments (such as Rhino).

A workaround is a bypass of a recognized problem in a system. ... AOL LLC (formerly America Online, Inc) is an online service provider, bulletin board system, and media company operated by Time Warner. ... Document Object Model (DOM) is a description of how an HTML or XML document is represented in a tree structure. ... In software engineering, the programming paradigms of aspect-oriented programming (AOP), and aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) attempt to aid programmers in the separation of concerns, specifically cross-cutting concerns, as an advance in modularization. ... Rhino is an open source JavaScript engine. ...

Sponsorship

Both IBM^[1] and Sun Microsystems^[2] have announced official support for Dojo, including code contributions. now. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ...

Criticism

A common criticism of Dojo is the lack of comprehensive documentation; various members of the Dojo community have made efforts to improve the quality of available documentation for the toolkit, but as of October 2006, no comprehensive documentation is available. In general terms, documentation is any communicable material (such as text, video, audio, etc. ...

References

External links

• Official Dojo Toolkit website
• Official Dojo Toolkit manual
• Dojo Review Ajax Projects