Dojo: The Definitive Guide

Part I. Base and Core

This part of the book provides a guided tour of Base and Core, the elements of the toolkit that comprise a powerful JavaScript standard library. Base is the kernel of the toolkit and is optimized to include an awesome amount of functionality that comes across the wire at under 30KB. Every feature included in Base has been scrutinized for utility, speed of execution, and size. You'll quickly find that once you start using Base, you won't want to live without it—nor do you have to: getting Base into your page is as simple as writing a single SCRIPT tag that can even be cross-domain loaded from one of AOL's geographically edge-cached servers. In addition to providing the logical base of the toolkit, everything in Base is included in the base-level dojo namespace, so finding the most commonly used functions and data members is always just a few keystrokes away.

Core supplements Base with additional functionality that you will certainly be using sooner rather than later, but in an effort to keep Base as lean and mean as possible, Core was packaged separately because its features are not quite common enough for all use cases. Still, pulling in resources from Core is just a dojo.require function call away, which is similar to #include from C programming or import from Java; from then on out, it's as though you had it all along. And as you'll see in Chapter 16 on Util, you can actually use the Dojo build system to combine exactly which additional non-Base resources ...