Dojo 101

A guide for newcomers, to help you get up to speed quickly with the essentials of Dojo
(page under construction).

Introduction

When I first started using Dojo, I quickly saw its promise. A good and growing collection of gui-like widgets, great AJAX, a warm supportive community, a very live project. I realised that it would be hard to beat Dojo as a Web 2.0 platform.
However, I found the documentation very hard to understand, and often it was missing out very essential and non-intuitive pieces of information, which has caused me to spend tens of hours scratching my head and stressing out.

I'm building this tutorial page to help newcomers to get comfortable with the basics of Dojo as quickly as possible, with the hope of preventing any pitfalls and frustrations along the way.

(At this stage, you might like to get a cup of coffee and/or something to eat, and put on some nice music, and allocate an hour or two of undistracted time for taking in this information. By the end of this tutorial, you will have all the essential concepts in place so that you can dive in and build your first Dojo-based RIA (Rich Internet Application). Whatever you still don't know by this stage, you should feel very confident to find out for yourself.

Intended Audience

Basically:

• People wanting to get started with writing 'Web 2.0' applications (aka 'Rich Internet Applications', or client-side web applications)
• People with moderate to strong experience with object-oriented programming, no javascript knowledge needed (though some javascript experience will make your learning a bit faster)
• People who are willing to share in the spirit of Open Source Software, sharing code with others and lightening the load of all concerned

Scope of Tutorial

We will be working through the following topics:

• Getting yourself prepared for your Dojo learning experience
• Some quick javascript coverage, in case you're new to javascript development
  
• Gathering some good Javascript bookmarks
• Getting a good development environment
• Playing around interactively with a bit of javascript
  
• Dojo download and installation
• Setting up a basic Dojo-powered website
• Getting a grasp of basic Dojo architecture, and an appreciation for its good MVC separation
  
• Creating your own workspace for creating your Dojo extensions and building your own Dojo-based project
  
• Getting an interactive client-side Hello, World app working
• Creating your own widgets, and adding logic to them
  
• Creating compound widgets - widgets containing other widgets
• Instantiating widgets within the HTML code of a web page
• Exchanging data with the server via dojo.io and dojo.rpc
• Writing server-side code to support this data exchange
• Putting it all together into a 'main application widget'
• Compiling all your code into a single compressed javascript file, so your app will load much more quickly
• Adding a front-end page to your app, to reduce the negative impact of the time your app takes to load
• Sharing your widgets with others
• Getting up to speed with reading through Dojo source code
  

By the time you've worked through all this, Dojo should be feeling much more comfortable and familiar to you.

(todo - complete this)