Rich Internet Applications with Dojo Toolkit 101
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The need for RIA (Rich Internet Applications) is driven by the desire to take the user to the next level in user interaction. There are various technology options for creating rich Internet applications, such as Lazlo, XUL, XForms, Flex2, Java, Dojo, and so on. This tutorial looks at just one aspect of using the Dojo toolkit. Simply stated,
dojo is a JavaScript toolkit which can be used for developing rich Internet applications.
Dojo enhances DHTML with JavaScript to cross browser boundaries with its legion of dedicated developers. Dojo provides through its APIs functionality for widgets not available in HTML such as Clock, DatePicker, Accordion and so on besides supporting AJAX functionality. It also provides support for animations, SVG, and more. The latest version has inline API documentation to many files which should greatly assist developers.
The question "What is Dojo?" is best answered by Matti's article (this was not picked for any particular reason) and by other numerous articles including those on the dojo Foundation web site. You may download the latest build, Dojo 0.4, from the above web site.
About this tutorial
I was attracted to this toolkit for its ease of implementation and wanted to gain first hand experience in using this toolkit. The toolkit version dojo-0.4.0-ajax was downloaded from the dojo toolkit web site. The less than 4.5 MB directory contains the following components.
A virtual directory named DojoAjax was created on the IIS 5.1 and the zip file was extracted to the local source for the virtual directory. This way the src attribute was set to the URL of the localhost as we shall see later. The examples in this 101 level tutorial show how the DatePicker and the Accordion controls are implemented in this framework using tags. The example also shows how the web pages are rendered in the latest of the browsers that Internet users are likely to come across.
Next: Displaying a simple button >>
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