Thursday, July 10, 2008

Endless JavaScript with Dojo

It was one year ago when my interest in AJAX and Dojo was awoken; while looking for some approach to draw geometrical objects within a web browser to evaluate the viability of a collaborative browser-based client for diagram design. However, I have been interested in JavaScript since many more years. It has been always an exciting language for my eyes, despite of its criticized existence.

Today I have received an email from mind42, announcing the end of the beta period. And due to my untiring curiosity I have been looking for more details. My first impresion is: "Wow, what an amazing tool for my mental divergences! and collaborative! and developed with dojo!"

This video shows some of its features:



Looking deeper, I have found this interesting video from Stefan Schuster where he discusses the possibilities of JavaScript development with Dojo:



You can also download the slides of the talk from Stefan Schuster website, or these other introduction slides about Dojo 0.9.

All this stuff have been very inspiring for me, and I am wondering about an abstract idea. It deals with the copcept of a self-defined web environment, where users could extend GUI components with the powerfull features provided by Dojo, like OO development (dojo.declare), namespaces (dojo.require), event handling (dojo.connect) and more on.

This extensions could be designed with the diagram capabilities of the environment itself or with a web-based text editor, monitoring preferred usage for futher research of their usability.

Moreover, it would be feasible to develop a Dojo IDE with the features claimed in Stefan Schuster's talk by means of this environment. Both diagram and text approaches.