Mobile industry is upgrading itself quite frequently. That’s the reason we are seeing various frameworks, operating system are getting released. So being a mobile application developer one has to keep himself updated.
With HTML5 and cross platform application development, javascript is into limelight again. And now we are seeing various frameworks for the hybrid application development written in javascript. I had an opportunity to explore one of such framework named “DOJO.js”. So while doing the exploration I did compare DOJO with other popular javascript libraries and found that for enterprise application development on all platforms DOJO is ideal.
DOJO gives high performance for web applications or mobile web applications. While doing that it is extremely small in size, almost 3.8kb
DOJO was first introduced in 2004 and since then they have released 14 versions. The interesting thing is, the first version can still be used. It has such backward compatibility. Since then it has introduced lot of features and it is highly optimized.
While exploring phonegap or some of the other frameworks, I observed one scenario. When you include the javascript file in your application it simply includes all the features it has designed to provide. If I don’t want to use some of the features from JS, I still tend to include it unnecessarily. But with DOJO, it is created in such a way that you can choose which modules to load and which not. It also supports asynchronously loading of modules.
Dijit provides extension to DOJO for creating UI. There are numerous components that are readily available. The special thing I liked about it is that it changes the theme of the application automatically based on platform from which I run the app. So iPhone app will have iPhonic theme, android app will have android specific theme and so is for blackberry and others. DOJO have managed it by creating various style sheets and using specific one based on user-agent.
DOJO provides dynamic charts too. I used sencha-touch and some other frameworks but DOJO’s charts are amazing. There are numerous types of charts already available and also they can be customized. Out of all the charts, geochart feature attracted me a lot.
On top of that we can use this DOJO framework for free. It is one of the few frameworks which is neatly and heavily documented. With its 1.8 release which happened in August 2012, DOJO team have improved their request APIs and they have added lots of new layouts and components. Accordian view is what I was looking for and I just got what I wanted.
It was also a need for me to use MVC pattern for javascript development. So earlier we decided to use backbone.js. And now after exploring this DOJO, I am so surprise and happy that it does allow me to use MVC pattern. I have this link that describes all the MVC frameworks in javascript and it compares them well.
DOJO is open source and its source code can be found here http://download.dojotoolkit.org/release-1.8.0/dojo-release-1.8.0/dojox/mobile/.
One can go through its demos from this URL http://demos.dojotoolkit.org/demos/
Being a blackberry developer this part really excited me. DOJO team have given samples with blackberry webworks. One can go through https://github.com/blackberry/BB10-WebWorks-Samples for better understanding of its implementation in blackberry.
During exploration, I came across DOJOs one more package naming “dgrid”. It is still in beta. But it is something new. A component just to show data in grids. Its lightweight too.
I hope this gives good material to start with for any javascript developer. Once anyone read this, I doubt he will give second though on what else to use.
Cheers to DOJO for this great work!!!
