A lot of the stock Dijit components are single-serve, meaning they only solve one style of problem. But Dojo is very flexible, and can work most any way you imagine or intend — you just have to put on your coder hat, and bend away. That’s where I come in. One of the things I do most often in my role as lead support for SitePen’s Dojo Support offering is to find simple solutions and workarounds for problems encountered when the widget code doesn’t behave exactly as you want, or otherwise needs some level of professional bending.
Author Archive
Quick Fixes and Dojo Support
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008Dojo: Building Blocks of the Web
Friday, October 17th, 2008Dojo is a very flexible toolkit. Most every aspect of its functionality is extensible by taking advantage of JavaScript’s dynamic nature. Today, I’m going to show you how you can write your own modular reusable code to create a generic component you can provide others (perhaps your development team, or designers?) to use in whichever way they desire … Just like the toolkit itself.
Implementing a Web Application Preloading Overlay
Monday, October 6th, 2008A common issue encountered when developing web applications with the Dojo Toolkit is a startup lag caused by the dynamic loading of modules and resources, further aggravated by a flash of unstyled content before the template system kicks in and sets up your widgets. This is especially true when using numerous Dijit components, and even more apparent when not using a custom build (such as loading your files from the Google or the AOL CDN). While it is typically recommended to use a custom build, it isn’t always practical, or even necessary. Perceived speed is speed, and we should do something about it.
Dojo is a very flexible toolkit, and can bend and otherwise be manipulated to handle any use case. Personally, I am a fan of the progressive use case: where JavaScript is used to enhance an otherwise perfectly working collection of clean markup and good styles. Sometimes though, especially in the case of intranet applications or “admin panel” type web interfaces, you will find yourself using many layout widgets and form components. Delivering content quickly in this case is essential, and hiding any ugliness resulting from template substitution is a vital aspect to delivering the best possible user experience. Today, I’m going to go over a common technique to provide at least the perception of perfectly designed full-page layout applications.
I’m Not Flash
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008Much like a magpie, I find myself oddly infatuated with shiny things. When a UI component somewhere just screams elegance, I find myself compelled to use it. A lot of the time a simple right-click will indicate the said UI was implemented in Flash, and it loses a tiny piece of street-cred.
I’m most impressed by FX when they enhance the user experience. By using subtle FX during transitions (or an element fading out rather than harshly ‘disappearing’ for example) we give our users an added element of flair while requiring nothing of their browser other than JavaScript being enabled. Any marketing type will tell you the value of a first and lasting impression. The UI really is the only thing the customer sees, isn’t it?
Dojo-Mini: Optimization Tricks with the Dojo Toolkit
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008The Dojo Toolkit 1.1 introduces support to run within Adobe’s AIR environment, and I think it may have re-sparked my interest in ActionScript. It was a lot easier than I had anticipated to get started coding, but came to a halt when it occurred to me that my newly created .air installer and badge would be at best a ~5MB download simply because of the default release size. A 5MB “Hello AIR” app is less than unimpressive, so I immediately started thinking of ways to better the situation. I need a custom minified Dojo Toolkit package.
Enter “dojo-mini” – an experiment in Dojo Toolkit deployment optimization. When Alex tagged the release, I immediately downloaded it, dropped it in as the toolkit for my upcoming AIR Demo and began browsing the source making a mental list of crufty files I could drop to shave some bytes away. I was amazed with my results:
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