You may have heard of Dojo, the javascript toolkit found at http://www.dojotoolkit.org/. The difference between it and its competitors such as jQuery and Ext JS is that it's much more than a toolkit, it's a full-fledged javascript framework. It provides things such as object-oriented programming (who would've thought you'd ever be able to have class inheritance in javascript?!), template-based widgets (you can dynamically create widgets in javascript that have html templates rather than having to dynamically create the tr's and td's with DOM manipulation), and basic utility functionality.

I've been using the more complex features of dojo, such as OO and template-based widgets, for some years but I never bothered with the basic utility functionality until today. It's pretty cool what dojo lets you do and it makes me sad that I was writing manual javascript code for years to do the same things. Here are a few of the cooler things that dojo lets you do:

1. Finding and looping through DOM elements

You can see the use of 3 dojo functions here: dojo.forEach, dojo.query, and dojo.attr. This will loop through all img elements that are children of the element with id "myDiv" and set the src of each image. Dojo.query is very powerful and can let you easily select the element(s) that you want from the page or from a specific parent node.

2. Creating DOM elements

This code creates an image, sets the src and title of it, and appends it to a div, all in 1 line of code!

3. Clearing DOM elements

Dojo.empty clears all child elements of the element inputted, no more grabbing all child elements, looping through them, and doing childNode.parentNode.removeChild(childNode).

I've barely scratched the surface of what you can do with dojo but you can go a long way with just these 3 concepts...

This is my first post and I'm excited to start blogging!! It seems like every day I run into some sort of issue and once I figure out how to solve it, it makes me wish I had a blog so I could post the solution so that others won't have to spend as much time on it as I did.

This blog will be related to .NET development, and more specifically front-end web development. I used to consider myself an ASP.NET developer but I feel like we've come upon a crossroads. Straight ahead is ASP.NET, to the left is pure javascript development, and to the right is Silverlight. You look further down the ASP.NET road and see that there's another branch up beyond this one, ASP.NET going to the left and ASP.NET MVC going to the right. Which road to take??