Dojo

As one quote at the start of chapters suggest, it’s best to show rather than tell. So Using Dojo takes a practical approach by taking the reader through building registration form throughout the first section. The first five chapters that make up the first section starts with an introduction and is followed by chapters covering how Dojo can help in the different areas of form processing.

This starts with client-side validation; here, the reader gets an introduction to Dojo’s style of adding attributes to HTML tags. Dojo takes the route of adding custom attributes to standard HTML tags, probably familiar to users of other JavaScript libraries. This is followed by a chapter on some of Dojo’s Ajax processing features, with a demonstration of the built-in auto-completion widget. The next chapter introduces more of Dojo’s widgets, showing how to add rich text forms. Finally, the first section ends with a chapter on processing the form.

While some JavaScript libraries are only now getting an official user interface library (jQuery) or animation is handled by a separate library (Prototype), a significant feature of Dojo has been making a desktop-like interface possible from the start. The middle section of the book is all about Dojo’s widgets. There is an extensive section documenting the dozens of widgets available and will probably be the most marked-up section of this book.

Finally, the third section takes an in-depth look at Dojo. Here the reader learns a bit more about Dojo’s past and future, and its system of modules. Following chapters cover objects and classes, strings and JSON functions, event handling, using Dojo’s aspect-orientated features, Ajax remoting, working with DOM, and finally testing and debugging.