Dojo: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 11. Dijit Overview

Dijit is the fantastic layer of widgets that the toolkit provides as drop-in replacements for the standard HTML web controls. This chapter paves the way for Part II by starting out with a fairly nontechnical discussion of Dijit's motivation, philosophy, and goals as an off-the-shelf resource, which dovetails into a discussion of how designers and ordinary page creators can use dijits in markup with little to no programming. The chapter concludes with a guided tour that provides a thorough overview of everything included in Dijit.

Motivation for Dijit

Web development is very much an engineering problem, and it has quite an intriguing history, filled with clever hacking and ingenuity. Although the web browser may be the ultimate platform from a conceptual standpoint, the problem from an engineering perspective is that virtually every interesting use case for delivering a rich user experience requires workarounds and augmentation of some form or another. From a very conservative estimate, the lack of conformance to standards by major industry players has produced a landscape littered with more than a half-dozen viable configurations, and along the increase of powerful mobile devices with web browsing capabilities, that number is only going to continue growing.

Consequently, developing maintainable applications for the Web has become more difficult than ever; if you don't support as many configurations as possible, you lose market share, popularity, and revenue. ...