The 1.2 release of the Dojo Toolkit is focused on the overall Look and Feel. Patches have been landing thick and fast to tighten up the visual polish. Most you might be hard-pressed to notice at first glance, but the devil is always in the details, and for a toolkit with the promise and scope of Dojo we have to sweat the small stuff.

Take Dijit’s toolbar buttons. In the editor, you have a row of graphical buttons for bold, italic, etc. For some time the rendering in Firefox has been inconsistent with the other browsers - there’s some extra space around the buttons. The result is that the toolbar is a little wider, and it’s just not tight.

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I think we’ve all seen Apache directory listings? They are a list of links + icons that detail the contents of the directory. You can go wild with a custom handler to format directory listing requests however you want. But for most cases they work just fine out of the box. They are kind of tedious to browse through though: scroll, scroll, click, or - worse - tab, tab, tab (tab, tab,) enter. A little Dojo magic might go a long way here.

This tutorial shows you how to upgrade those plain vanilla pages to make getting around a little faster and along the way introduce you to some of the most useful bits of Dojo, and practical techniques for working with them. We’ll touch on: dojo.query, dojo.data, the dojo parser and dijit (specifically the FilteringSelect widget.)

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