Dojo: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 16. Build Tools, Testing, and Production Considerations

After all your hard work developing with Dojo, there comes a point when your application is ready for prime time. Util provides terrific build tools and a testing framework that can get you ready for production before you know it. The build tools provided by Util are the same ones that are used to produce each official Dojo release, and the Dojo Objective Harness (DOH) is a unit-testing framework that facilitates achieving some automated quality assurance before your app ever gets out the door.

Building

For any production setting, minimizing the overall footprint of your JavaScript files and the number of synchronous requests to the server is absolutely essential. The difference in downloading scores of individual resource files via synchronous requests incurred by dojo.require versus one or two calls back to the server makes all the difference in the world in terms of a snappy page load.

Dojo's build tools makes accomplishing what may initially seem like such an arduous task quite easy. In a nutshell, the build tools automate the following tasks:

• Consolidates multiple modules into a single JavaScript file called a layer

• Interns template strings into JavaScript files, including layers, so that a standalone template is no longer needed

• Applies ShrinkSafe, a JavaScript compressor based on Rhino, to minify the size of the layers by removing whitespace, linebreaks, comments, and shortening variable names

• Copies all of the "built" ...