Dojo style coding

I'm new to dojo style coding. Got used to pure javascript and then jQuery style. Searched through and got some results such as

• Dojo, when used开发者_如何学运维 with closure compiler works best.
• advanced dojo is more OO than procedural type

I'm having problems with

• dojo.require() - whenever I download a plugin for dojo, I get the error - 404 NOT FOUND. and half the time for developing goes in fixing this issue, getting the js file and placing it at location.
• And is it possible to extend the dojo object as in jQuery we extend the root jquery object by using $.fn.somefunction that is internally defined as jQuery.fn = jQuery.prototype. Is there something similar in dojo.
• And I feel documentation for dojo is not as good as jQuery's.
• What are dijit and dojox ? When I import dojo.js from Google api library, and then using a plugin in dojo, these dijit and dojox were always a problem.

Need some help. I'm porting few plugins from jQuery to dojo. These plugins are not available in dojo.

I feel that you have to use the entire library when coding using dojo, and then compile it to get the optimized code, and export it to whereever needed. Am I right here? if not, what am I doing wrong?

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1) dojo.require automatically downloads the needed files through XHR requests. You don't need to download anything manually. If you use the google CDN all classes should download from there, i would recommend to download the full package to your local application and use it from there. Later you probably want to create a Build. You should also read Starting with Dojo

2) Enhancing dojo like jQuery don't makes any sense. dojo is just the top namespace and under it you have a lot of classes like dojo.Animation, dojo.behavior, dojo.Deferred, dojo.NodeList and a lot of other classes. Some are functions like dojo.connect() and dojo.style().

If you want to create a new class look into dojo.declare. You can also create new classes under the dojo "namespace" or other namespaces.

If you want to add a new function to the dojo namespace, you can just type dojo.new_function = function(){} Like normal JavaScript. But i wouldn't recommend that. It can make problems if you upgrade to later Dojo versions.

jQuery and Dojo are completly different. If you type something like $('.data') in jQuery it fetches all dom-nodes with the class "data" and it returns a new object wraped in the jQuery class.

In Dojo you use dojo.query('.data') for the same effect. But it returns a new object of the type dojo.NodeList. If you want to add new functions to the chain ability you need to extend dojo.NodeList.

There already exists some extension like dojo.NodeList-fx that adds the Animation effect to the dojo.NodeList class. If you load the class with dojo.require() your dojo.Nodelist will extend automatically. Look into Extend dojo.NodeList for more information.

3) The documentation is quite good, everything you asked is already documented and i provided some ressources you completly find on the main page from Dojo. The difference is that Dojo is a completly Toolkit, including GUI, layout systems, Widgets, data abstraction and a lot of other really high-level stuff. If you never worked with something like that, it could be hard to start with it because it contains so much. jQuery doesn't provide anything like this. So sometimes it is sure easier to start with it.

For documentation look at:

• Tutorials
• Reference Guide
• API Browser

4) Dojo is a toolkit that uses 3 namespaces in JavaScript dojo, dijit and dojox. The dojo namespace contains things that nearly everybody uses later, like a Framework for I18N, L10N, model abstraction like dojo.data or dojo.store and a lot of other stuff.

Just loading the "dojo.js" file by the way don't give you everything that dojo provides.

The dijit namespace contains a lot of widgets in Dojo. All Widgets in the dijit namespace have full I10N and L10N support. dijit contains Dialog, Layout Systems, Widgets like calendar, buttons, select fields, radio fields, a full WYSIWYG Editor under dijit.Editor.

Also see the Dijit Theme Editor to see what Dijit contains. The complete site including layout is complete based on dijit.

The dojox namespace contains a lot of extra functionality that dont fit in dijit or are experimental. But not everything is experimental. You find things like the dojox.grid.DataGrid or dojox.charting (Start Charting, Advanced Charting) or Systems like dojox.gfx to create cross-browser graphics that uses SVG, Canvas, VRML, Silverlight or Flash.

Just look into Beyond Dojo's Core to get a (small) overview what dijit and dojox contains.