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Part 1: Life With Dojo - Dojo and Dijit Application Examples

Dojo applications look good, but their primary benefit is in helping real people solve real interaction problems in real web application. Dojo makes it easy to design a more usable web experience for the intended audience.

The following personas illustrate how people with different goals and skill sets can make Dojo work for them. We will follow them working through an example. The personas and examples are made-up, but broadly represent who the toolkit is built for and each section of the book is designed to help solve problems for each of them, sometimes more for one than the others, but always for their users:

John Walsh is a Web Developer. He’s been out of college for 3 years and he works for a small company that creates web sites for clients. He lives and breathes HTML and CSS. He has some basic JavaScript experience, for example with click handlers.  He knows a lot about Photoshop, but if you ask him most days, he doesn’t really consider himself to be a Designer. Several of his older co-workers would call themselves Designers and only incidentally Web Developers. John and his co-workers care greatly about how an interface looks, they are completely sold on CSS, and they want their tools to work the way they think they should.

Andy Tso has been doing the "startup thing" for nearly a decade. He's seen it all and is a very discerning consumer of technology. He couldn't get enough of his CS and math courses when he was at Stanford. After graduation Andy didn't really know where he wanted to go, so he started on an advanced CS degree at MIT but dropped when some of his other friends left to found an e-commerce thing in '98. It imploded quickly but by that time he'd caught the startup bug. His current startup is pushing the edges of what you can (or should) do in a browser and when they started investigating Dojo, they saw it wasn't everything they needed, but certainly a good starting point. Andy is the kind of guy who could have written Dojo but is wise enough not to. He might contribute patches, though. Andy's main problem is getting through the gunk to the hard tech docs and giving his junior Developers something to work from.

Laura Allen is an Enterprise IT Developer. She has worked for the same (medium sized) company over the past 15 years as it has been bought out twice and renamed three times. She supports internal development sites and relies on tools and frameworks all day long. For her, Web2.0 is tremendously exciting. She didn't know you could do much of anything in a browser, but things that aren't Java/PHP scare her a bit. She’s heard that Microsoft mentioned a toolkit too but her manager saw a Dojo demo at a conference and now he’s pushing his teams to investigate Dojo.

Debugging Dojo

Shouldn't this chapter contain a subsection on "debugging dojo". For example, dojo 0.3 had dojo.debug(""), methods. For 0.9, I think you need to use Firebug, but I am not sure.

Debugging

... is covered in Part 4: Meta-Dojo. But we'll consider putting a subsection in one of the upcoming examples. It is a handy thing to know early.

why only show example of importing from AOL

I don't know why you guys assume that everyone should connect internet when they do some coding. Is this because of a business reason? Fortunately, I still have 0.9 version book. Please, no one care that spends a little time to install dojo. It maybe provide a convenience way to import everything from AOL. But, this should not be the first choice.

Not true

People DO care. They want a gentle learning curve and zero up-front investment in learning Dojo. There are no corporate reasons behind it - we just want everyone's first experiences with Dojo to be painless. And really, you only have to swap out three statements for it work on your own server. I'll make that clearer in the first section. Thanks!

And we no longer get

And we no longer get bombarded with "dojo isnt loading" because we can never tell where someone is going to install Dojo on their system... with the CDN, we dont have to care where they load it or if they load it. When they get to that point, swapping out few CDN lines that Creike mentions is a breeze.

-Karl

dojo vs. digit

going from introduction to part 1 I got lost !!!
What happened to dojo ; I found my self into examples and then into digit.

I think the Hello world approach is more rewarding.