Declaring Dojo for Ajax

June 5, 2008

The Ajax (define) approach to Web development is all about making the Web more interactive for users. For developers, toolkits like the open source Dojo Ajax toolkit are supposed to simplifying the task of using Ajax, but that is not always the case.

That's where the new dojo.E extensions effort comes into play, aimed at making Dojo more declarative so that it can be more easily implemented by a wider array of developers.

Dojo.E is a small JavaScript library that a developer includes on top of Dojo, enabling them to mix in the markup language with HTML, or calling it from an external reference file.

"Dojo.E ... allows developers to access Dojo functionality and add Dojo behaviors to their applications using a declarative markup language," Nexaweb Chief Architect Bob Buffone told InternetNews.com. "Right now, if you're using Dojo, you're doing it by using a lot of JavaScript. This new XML markup really abstracts a lot of the underlying Dojo implementation and lets developers interact with a higher-order language."

The effort is spearheaded by enterprise Ajax developer Nexaweb and comes at a time when the technology is extending deeper into the mainstream of enterprise development efforts.

At the same time, Dojo has emerged as a major force in Ajax, having become one of the mostly widely used toolkits, thanks in part to the backing of major vendors including IBM, Sun and AOL, as well as Nexaweb....

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Source: internetnews.com