Claus Witt

Just today, while reading about the release of the Dojo Toolkit 1.3 beta, I learned about the plugd addition to Dojo Toolkit. The author of plugd describes it this way.

The API’s found in plugd are loosely based on “my favorite bits of jQuery” … this is not meant to be a ‘compatibility shim’ of any kind, it is simply the addition of functions and helpers to Dojo Base. Added magic.

plugd adds several convenience functions, all located in the dojo namespace. For instance, by loading base.js into a page, the following new Dojo API’s are made available:

* dojo.show(), dojo.hide(), dojo.toggle()
* dojo.conflict()
* dojo.wrap()
* dojo.create()

And the following methods are added to dojo.NodeList (what you get back from calling dojo.query() (or $() after running dojo.conflict()):

* .wrap()
* .show(), .hide(), .toggle()
* .val()
* .append()
* .appendTo()
* .create()
* .animate()
* .destroy()
* .hover()
* .end() (and stash() for private use)

Alex Russel just (well a couple of days ago) anounced that the beta of the newest version of Dojo Toolkit is available. I’m looking forward to the actual release of this version, it seems very very fast.

Dojo has always (since I got around to learning about javascript frameworks anyway) been my favourite js-framework. Maybe this is just because it was the first one I learned to use. But it is built a way that seems very intuitive to me. I guess (if I had been a superstar js-developer) I would have done everything just as they have done. I am looking forward to learning even more about the new version of Dojo Toolkit, and creating even more applications using it in the near future.