Dojo: The Definitive Guide

Foreword

Truth be told, it was DHTML that got me kicked out of college.

I still vividly recall the 3 A.M. moments when endless trolling of MSDN documentation and W3C specifications and hundreds of comp.lang.javascript posts all coalesced into dozens of "what if . . . " moments. Like hot brands on the hide of my brain, each of these tiny discoveries would not let their mark off of me until I had exhausted all inroads into making the browser do what I wanted it to. Back then, a small community of folks were all doing the same, feverishly one-upping each other and posting to the DHTMLCentral forums with each new component, technique, or hack to make things work on Netscape. Nothing about 7 A.M. Latin conjugations or endless lectures on Java? held much appeal by comparison to discovering the true beauty of closures, or finally, completely understanding prototypal inheritance. Even my Christmas holidays were engulfed in JavaScript learning and hacking. I'm sure my girlfriend and my parents worried for me greatly, but they never said anything. From the ashes of my truncated academic career came an understanding of open source (http://opensource.org), lasting friendships, and, eventually, Dojo.

Over time, the job of the DHTML hacker has changed. We know most of the tricks that we can expect a browser to do, and where there is overlap between browsers, we've probably already exploited it . . . just look at the depth and diversity of modules in Dijit and DojoX. The work of a DHTML/Ajax developer ...