The previous installment of the Dive Into Dojo series shows how easy it is to Dive Into Dojo Charting to get started with Dojo’s charting library. It comes with dozens of stylish themes you can effortlessly plug into any chart. But what if you want your charts to match your website’s design or business’ branding? No worries: Dojo’s charting library allows you to create custom themes!
Tags: charting, Dojo, gfx
Posted in Dojo, UI Design, Vector Graphics | 4 Comments
Dojo Toolkit 1.5 is now available for immediate download. Dojo is a JavaScript toolkit that is lean enough for use on a simple blog, yet powerful enough to scale to solve the most advanced web application engineering challenges, allowing you to use just the features and flexibility needed for your application. The 11th major Dojo release, version 1.5 offers many important improvements and enhancements and remains as IP-safe, freely-licensed, and free to use as the first release over five years ago.
Tags: Dojo, dojo15
Posted in Dojo, JavaScript, ajax | 14 Comments
Node is a server-side JavaScript platform that is known for being well suited for Comet-style applications that utilize long-lived connections to allow applications to send messages from the server to the browser asynchronously. In fact, the beginning of the front page of nodejs.org starts out with an example of a web application that delays for a couple seconds before sending a response without any type of blocking; the code is asynchronous and efficient.
However, building a real-life real-time application involves more than just a platform that gives you asynchronous communication, there are a number of other important techniques to understand. We will look at these techniques and introduce project Tunguska that provides some helpful tools to assist in building applications. While a number of Comet projects out there attempt to provide a black box solution to Comet, Tunguska recognizes that most real-time applications involve deep integration into the application and its security, messaging, and data structures. Consequently Tunguska is a set of tools for building real-time applications rather than a closed black box that can’t easily be integrated with. Let’s look at some of these tools.
Tags: comet, jack, narwhal, nodejs, tunguska
Posted in CommonJS, Persevere | 3 Comments
Modules are an integral architectural piece of robust application development since they allow individual components to be developed with proper dependency management. Modules can specify dependencies and these can be automatically resolved and loaded to bring various pieces together automatically. In application development this is vastly more scalable and easier than having to track all the different dependencies and manually load modules or insert script tags.
The CommonJS module format is increasingly ubiquitous as the de facto module format for JavaScript. However, if CommonJS modules, by themselves, are directly executed, they require synchronous loading of modules. Synchronous loading is known to be very problematic in the browser since it locks the browser user interface, requires eval-based compilation of scripts which confuses debuggers, and is less efficient than using standard script tags.
Tags: requiresjs, transporter, yabble
Posted in CommonJS, Dojo, Persevere | 3 Comments
NodeJS has demonstrated impressive performance potential as an HTTP server. By combining highly optimized HTTP parsing algorithms with the speedy V8 JavaScript engine and using an event-based architecture, Node has posted eye-opening request handling numbers. However, Node historically has been limited by its inability to provide true concurrent request handling, greatly limiting its ability to leverage increasingly multiple core servers. The latest release of Node introduced new functionality for socket sharing that can be coupled with child process spawning to achieve concurrent multi-process request handling for a single TCP socket. Multi-node exists to leverage this capability to make it simple to start up a multi-process Node server.
Posted in Persevere | 5 Comments
One of the most powerful pieces of Dojo is also one of the most underutilized: Charting. The Dojo Charting library lives within the DojoX (extensions) branch of Dojo, and features numerous chart types, options, and a variety of themes. This post introduce you to the charting library and show you how you can take a boring data collection and make it a beautiful visual chart in any modern web browser.
Posted in Dojo, storage | 10 Comments
One huge feature that sets the Dojo Toolkit apart from other JavaScript libraries is its UI component system: Dijit. A flexible, comprehensive collection of Dojo classes (complemented by corresponding assets like images, CSS files, etc.), Dijit allows you to create flexible, extensible, stylish widgets. To learn how to install, configure, and use basic Dijits within your web application, keep reading!
Tags: dijit, dojo15
Posted in Dojo, UI Design | 12 Comments
Like all top-notch JavaScript toolkits, Dojo tries to make its classes as flexible as possible, knowing that users of the toolkit may have different ideas about how a given class or class method should work. Luckily, Dojo provides you a number of methods by which you can subclass or modify existing classes. Let’s examine a few ways you can make Dojo classes exactly the way you like.
Posted in Dojo, api | 4 Comments