I recently restarted a project that I haven’t worked on in nearly a year. I am using Dojo for the project. I ran the application in order view the current functionality and to try to figure out where I stopped in my development. I then upgraded to a new version (1.3) and viewed the website once again. I immediately noticed a firebug message that basically told me that the LayoutContainer was being deprecated and would not be used in version 2. The message also suggested that I should use BorderContainer instead.

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I am working on a project using Dojo and I wanted all the buttons in the application to have the same width. By default Dojo will set the width of the button by the width of the button label (the more characters in the label, the wider the button). To set all the buttons to the same width, I add the following to my CSS file:

.dijitButtonNode {
     width:150px;
}

Simple enough.

Although I had created a few code snippets using Scriptaculous/Prototype, Dojo Toolkit was the first Javascript Framework that I really learned. I had read about (and downloaded) it quite a few years before I actually used it. I purchased a couple of books (Mastering Dojo: JavaScript and Ajax Tools for Great Web Experiences (Pragmatic Programmers) and Dojo: The Definitive Guide) to help me get started. I was working on a project where web pages would be dynamically created. I have to admit, I struggled. Although Dojo is a  “Javascript” Framework, learning it was like learning a new language – before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. While I was able to learn the basics from reading the books and looking at the examples on Dojo’s website, in many cases, I just could not find the documentation to do what I wanted to do (or how I wanted to do it). So I guessed. And guessed again. And continually guessed until, “Eureka!”. No that didn’t work either…

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