The Dojo toolkit is a JavaScript solution designed to save time and offer productivity that scales alongside your development process. Dojo essentially offers everything you’d need to construct the perfect web application, from language utilities to UI components and a whole lot more. Many regard Dojo to be one of the most powerful, yet highly underutilized JavaScript systems on the market today.
Ultimately, as a developer, you’ll find yourself considering a lot of different JavaScript frameworks throughout the years. However, the Dojo Toolkit actually has a lot of exciting solutions to offer developers who want to streamline their workflow. Here are just some of the reasons we think you should consider using the Dojo toolkit for your development process.
1. Incredible Dijit UI Framework
Perhaps the biggest advantage that the Dojo toolkit offers over other JavaScript frameworks is its Digit UI system. This fantastic layout boasts a range of incredible features, including absolute out of the box localization and full accessibility support. The Dijit UI also comes with advanced widgets for layout functionality, which eliminates the complexity of configuring height elements, custom splitters, and layout modification.
There are also LESS files for custom theming, and modular coding which allows for a broad range of customisations and extensions.
2. Unbeatable Depth
One of the key things that make the Dojo toolkit so impressive is that it’s a full-stack solution. In other words, this means that you don’t just bring together different components from various sources and hope they work together as smoothly as they should Instead, Dojo allows every component in the stack to build on a trusted set of building blocks, providing a fully integrated infrastructure and a range of unique optional modules. The various components of Dojo provide a great solution for those who want to overcome a range of user experience problems.
As well as giving you everything you need out of the box, Dojo also allows developers to tweak various elements to meet their needs too. You can enjoy everything from time-tested module systems to pane-based layouts in the same solution.
3. High-Quality Performance
The people behind Dojo know that you need something exceptional to upgrade your developer experience. As such, the infrastructure of the framework is designed for accessibility, simplicity, and internalisation. Keystrokes are simple to use, and all the components of the stack fit together as a complete whole. Additionally, as mentioned above, everything can be customised with CSS, but you probably won’t need to change much to get a great UI throughout your system.
Dojo even offers a solution for developers who want to create mobile applications. The Dojox/mobile namespace comes with device detection utilities, themes for iOS, Blackberry and Android, and layout widgets too.
4. Amazing Performance
The Dojo toolkit helps to create exciting, high-profile websites around the internet every day, and part of the reason for this is the broad range of fantastic build tools that Dojo has to offer. Dojo’s system makes it as easy as possible to manage several large-scale UI development projects and develop build system layers on top of your applications.
Additionally, Dojo also offers high-performance implementations for a range of popular utilities, with the recent rebuilt focusing on reduced code footprint and high performance. Ultimately, Dojo offers a simple and small lightweight toolkit that’s incredibly fast and streamlined. You can add your own extensibility through Dojo/Declare. Because Dojo/Declare is used throughout the framework, developers can use mixins to share functionality across classes, easily extend existing classes, and share modules of code across projects.
5. Strong Community
Finally, Dojo comes with a powerful open community. The open nature of the framework has brought a host of innovative individuals and companies together to create tools that support a range of needs. The licensing behind the Dojo toolkit has been carefully designed to be as agnostic as possible so that everyone from any background can get involved. According to the people behind Dojo, the barriers to entry for the toolkit are purposefully very low.
Dojo developers don’t mind how qualified someone else is if they want to contribute something to the experience. All Dojo cares about is that you’re interested in making something that helps to improve the Dojo experience for everyone involved. Today, Dojo is continuing to work on changing the nature of the open source marketplace, so everyone feels welcome and appreciated in their online community.