Esri provides the excellent ArcGIS for JavaScript API for building geospatial applications. Their approach has grown substantially over the years, from basic two-dimensional maps comparable to early Google Maps implementations to now cover nearly everything I can imagine wanting to do in a 2-D or 3-D map.

Underneath the API, Esri still finds significant value leveraging Dojo Toolkit 1.x features though their APIs now include significant TypeScript support and some features from modern Dojo. Their team has also made efforts to make it easier to integrate the existing Esri JavaScript APIs with modern Dojo.

Because of Esri’s history of leveraging Dojo I’ve been frequently invited to speak at their annual developer summit and have met many Esri developers over the years. This year I was invited to deliver two talks.

The first was a look at recent advances in TypeScript. The intended audience for this talk was someone who tried TypeScript a couple of years ago, saw the potential, but struggled due to some of the previous limitations. In this talk I explored some of the recent advances and improvements with TypeScript such as conditional types as well as a look forward to some of the TypeScript team’s plans to further improve developer ergonomics.

My second talk was a review of the state of Dojo and its benefits. I opened with the remark that I usually speak at the Esri Dev Summit about how Dojo 2 will ship soon, I usually catch a cold or flu at the conference, and I usually play dodgeball. Last year I wasn’t able to make the Dev Summit, so I added that last year instead we shipped Dojo 2 (and versions 3, 4, and then 5 earlier this year), that I did get ill, and that I missed the dodgeball experience. I introduced the audience to a number of recent additions with version 5 of Dojo and also had some fun with our Cats vs. Dogs Dojo demo.

I also distributed a healthy amount of Dojo and SitePen swag as well!

I am already looking forward to next year’s conference to learn about the new features the Esri team builds into the next version of their JavaScript API. Thanks Esri!