Dojo: 1st impression
The best thing about Dojo 0.1: it’s quite easy to create portable widgets. Such widgets work similar to Microsoft IE’s behaviors but they are even more self-contained. Dojo widgets can work with fragments of HTML and CSS, which will be inserted during the object creation. The event system is very elaborate. Of course Dojo is more than a simple widget factory. For example I didn’t try the I/O facility yet.
The worst thing about Dojo: it’s very rough. Documentation is lacking, examples are missing (or too specific), platform-dependent bugs are roaming the code. In other words it is a typical 0.1 version.
It helps that Dojo is under heavy development. Guys are fixing bugs and adding new features on almost hourly basis. There is a very helpful support group. I got my questions answered in a matter of minutes. I am convinced that Dojo has a great potential.
Get Dojo here: http://dojotoolkit.org/. Gmane has two Dojo-related groups: gmane.comp.web.dojo.devel and gmane.comp.web.dojo.user.
I’ve made a very simple Yellow Fade widget to highlight recent blog entries.
I’ve implemented a simple Shadow widget as well and it worked locally but I had some problems with a correct placement of shadows on my web site. Eventually I abandoned it because FireFox produces some visible movements during DOM manipulations even for visibility: hidden
elements. Is it a FireFox' bug? I have no idea.