Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #685037 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780132358040
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

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.

Customer Reviews

A weak introduction to Dojo
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.

Good Intro
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.

A powerful tool packed with shortcuts and special methods for handling JavaScript problems
Dojo offers web developers and designers a fine JavaScript tool for developing Ajax applications, and here's a developer's technical guide to Dojo and its growing applications. Chapters come from an expert Web designer and focus on tweaking existing applications and pages using Dojo, adding Ajax features and Dojo's user interface, and showing how to use its components effectively. The result is a powerful tool packed with shortcuts and special methods for handling JavaScript problems, making for a powerful reference recommended for any applications library.