Dojo: Using the Dojo JavaScript Library to Build Ajax Applications [Paperback]

James E. Harmon (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0132358042 | ISBN-13: 978-0132358040 | Publication Date: June 21, 2008 | Edition: 1

Dojo offers Web developers and designers a powerful JavaScript toolkit for rapidly developing robust Ajax applications. Now, for the first time, there’s a complete, example-rich developer’s guide to Dojo and its growing library of prepackaged widgets. Reviewed and endorsed by the Dojo Foundation, the creators of Dojo, this book brings together all the hands-on guidance and tested code samples you need to succeed.

 

Expert Web developer James E. Harmon begins by demonstrating how to “Ajax-ify” existing applications and pages with Dojo, adding Ajax features such as client- and server-side validation as quickly and nondisruptively as possible. Next, he presents in-depth coverage of Dojo’s user interface, form, layout, and specialized Widgets, showing how they work and how to use them most effectively. Among the Widgets, he covers in detail: Date Pickers, Rich Text Editors, Combo Boxes, Expandable Outlines, and many others.

 

In conclusion, Harmon introduces the Dojo toolkit’s powerful capabilities for simplifying Ajax development. He thoroughly explains Dojo’s helper functions, shortcuts, and special methods, illuminating each feature with examples of the JavaScript problems it can solve. This section’s far-ranging coverage includes strings, JSON support, event handling, Ajax remoting, Dojo and the DOM, testing, debugging, and much more. All source code examples are provided on a companion Web site, including source code for a complete tutorial case study application.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

James E. Harmon is the President and Senior Instructor at Object Training Group in Chicago. He is an experienced developer who spent a majority of his career building large scale online applications at Accenture and for several other Web-centric consulting firms. He now specializes in training Java Developers to be more productive by using the latest technologies and frameworks.

 

The book’s web site is http://www.ObjectTrainingGroup.com/dojobook.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Foreword

If there is one lesson to be learned from the Dojo Toolkit, it is "Be careful what you wish for!" When we first started Dojo, we had the modest goal of creating a JavaScript toolkit that would be useful and would prevent expert JavaScript developers from having to reinvent the wheel. With the buzz and excitement that would soon follow with the emergence of the term Ajax, we quickly found ourselves as the creators of a toolkit used by thousands and thousands of developers and millions of users in a very short time.

In the case of any project or company that grows much faster than expected, there are growing pains along the way. It has taken Dojo nearly 18 months to address and solve most of the issues caused by its rapid success: performance, comprehension, ease of use, and documentation. Open source projects are notoriously bad at both marketing and documentation, and Dojo was initially no exception to the rule. With each release from Dojo 0.9 to 1.1 and beyond, documentation and API viewing tools have improved significantly and are now something we're proud to have rather than being a blemish to the project.

Above and beyond source code documentation, demos, and great examples is the need for great books. When learning something new, the most difficult things to learn are usually the questions you don't know how to ask. The vernacular and philosophy of Dojo is very powerful and efficient but often leaves developers new to Dojo not knowing where to get started. Dojo in particular and Ajax in general also have the learning curve of basically needing to understand a wide range of technologies, from server-side programming languages to JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and the DOM, plus the browser quirks and inconsistencies across each. Toolkits such as Dojo go to great lengths to rescue developers from the most common and egregious of these issues, but developers creating something new will inevitably run into trouble along the way.

There are numerous opportunities for developers and users of Dojo to solve their problems and get up to speed, from reading this book to online community support, and the commercial support provided by companies such as SitePen.

Dojo has thrived and succeeded because of its transparent and open development process. All code is licensed under the AFL and BSD, licenses which are focused on adoption rather than control.

Contributions have been received from hundreds of individuals and from companies such as AOL, Google, IBM, Nexaweb, Renkoo, SitePen, Sun, WaveMaker, and many more. We have a strict but low-barrier contribution policy that requires all source code contributions to be made through a Contributor License Agreement, ensuring that usage of Dojo will not cause legal or IP headaches now or in the future.

And we innovate and experiment more than any other toolkit, introducing features in DojoX that are far ahead of other toolkits.

I first met James Harmon at a conference when he was giving a talk about Dojo. The great thing about James' approach was that he did an amazing job of simplifying the message. Alex Russell and I have a tendency to beat people over the head with every feature and every possibility, whereas James was able to distill complex topics down to easy-to-follow concepts that help people quickly get up to speed with Dojo.

This book takes the same simple approach of clearly explaining how to create web applications and web sites with Dojo in a manner that should make it easy, even for developers who are not JavaScript experts, to quickly get up to speed and become effective with the Dojo Toolkit.

Dylan Schiemann
CEO, SitePen
Cofounder, Dojo Toolkit

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (June 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0132358042
• ISBN-13: 978-0132358040
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #672,083 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #63 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Languages & Tools > Ajax

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A weak introduction to Dojo, June 26, 2008

By 

somename - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Dojo: Using the Dojo JavaScript Library to Build Ajax Applications (Paperback)

I was a little disappointed in this book, but before I go on to the reasons let me explain what I am looking for. I am not new to programming, web development, or writing fairly complicated applications with Javascript. I am already fairly familiar with toolkit such as Ext and Dojo before the version jump. I was hoping this book would be a good reference and guide to working with the features of Dojo. I am not as interested in "dojoifying" web pages as I am in creating Javascript applications that heavily integrate with Dojo. This book may be decent for a web developer that wants an introduction to adding Dojo to web pages, but for a software engineer that wants to really get in depth in Dojo this book seems fairly week to me.

The book has 316 pages and is broken down into 3 sections.

Section I is called "Dojo a Tutorial." This walks the reader through a standard web form implemented without Dojo and then the process of switching to Dojo Widgets and simple client/server communication. (63 pages)

Section II is "Dojo Widgets." This section is a decent reference to many widgets including the layout widgets which get their own chapter. It includes HTML Markup Examples and Javascript constructor examples. I really like these, but they usually seem to be very basic. It also has nice pictures of many of the widgets and layouts to help you understand what they are. I like this section, but unfortunately it is limited to the core features of each widget. The examples are pretty bare, and many of the non-essential features are left out. I do see this being one of the more useful parts of the book, but I really wish there was more depth to it. (121 pages)

Section III is "Dojo in Detail."
This contains a lot more of the meat of the book, but everything remains pretty lightweight. Some examples and references are given to the Dojo API and various helper function included in Dojo. There is some talk of JSON, event handling, XMLHttpRequests, and testing. This is all good stuff, but it really lacks depth. Everything just seems to brush against the surface. It still is essential and will help someone get started, but I don't think it will take you very far beyond that. (112 pages)


I have only had this book a few days now. I am really glad that books on Dojo are starting to come out. I haven't yet received any of the other new Dojo books, so I can't compare them. This book is alright for getting started and for a light reference to common features. My big complaint is the lack of depth.

I wish there were more examples and more details of the features and internals of Dojo. A chapters on making your own widgets instead of a 3/4 page mostly irrelevant section would have been nice. More details on customizing and overriding Dojo's CSS to make your application look the way you want it to would have been great. I think Dojo's grid feature deserves a chapter since it is something that so many applications can take advantage of. There are many things of this sort that the book either left out or just lightly touched.

Overall I'm giving this 2 stars. It's alright, but it's not what I need. I don't think this book contains nearly enough depth to help people far along into building Ajax Applications. It is a good intro and a reference to basic features. It can be helpful to a web developer looking to add some Dojo functionality to a site. For the serious user though this book really doesn't have enough content to take you very far into using Dojo.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good to get you started but there are some issues, August 17, 2008

By 

BGR (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dojo: Using the Dojo JavaScript Library to Build Ajax Applications (Paperback)

The book is a good book on getting you stated in Dojo and the examples are good. The book though seems a bit rushed to market there is errors in the code everywhere I seen typos to just completly wrong code in the book. I would have rated this higher but the errors are a problem if you try and follow the code in the book. My suggestion is you need to download the code from the authors website. Follow that code instead. I have read the other dojo books and they have a simular problem. Dojo is very powerful and there just isn't very many people to review the books for mistakes. If you looking for documentaion on Dojo and you do a lot of server side programming then it is worth buying this book as it was meant for you..

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Intro, September 18, 2008

By 

E. Peck "JR Peck" (Orlando, FL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dojo: Using the Dojo JavaScript Library to Build Ajax Applications (Paperback)

This is a nice intro. It is in three parts and runs a little contrary to the normal flow in a book like this. The first section is a hands on tutorial, the middle section is reference and the last section contains definitions, more of an introduction and information on using capabilities that are not tied to widgets.

There's a sentence in chapter 15 that mentions using widgets later. This makes me think that editors moved around the order of the book - because in most computer books the stuff in the third section would be first.

I personally liked this change. It got me in and running immediately on using some code. I didn't need to work through a bunch of explanation first. The widget documentation is o.k. I guess, though not really necessary. I would have enjoyed more in depth examples and explanations.

I think this book would best serve someone new to javascript and libraries of this type. It gives enough to help a beginner get going and be immediately successful, so that they don't give up. A more experienced developer might be frustrated with the repetition between the sections and the high-level overview on most material.

But for anyone who wants to learn a new technology and doesn't want to get bogged down in a massive volume that covers every single bit of minutiae - this is a good start.