Django Ajax and Dojo?

The other day in the #django channel I was msg'd by Alex, a developer for the Dojo Javascript toolkit. (Have anyone noticed that javascript toolkits are popping up like crazy?). Well, Alex asked my, "Why are you using prototype.js for Django Ajax". I told him that I used it for some other projects and it's simple. He told my to take a look at his project.

At first glance I thought, "Man, Dojo is much more than what Django Ajax needs." It looked over complicated and I just didn't want to get into figuring out how this thing works. (It was probably late at night). All I thought that Django Ajax needed was a simple ajax library. I told Alex, "Dojo looks like overkill for my needs." He responded by saying, "This maybe true, but people are going to want this." I thought he was just trying to push his project. Man was I wrong...

Today I took a second look at Dojo because MochiKit was released and it had a reference to Dojo on their site. The other day I looked at this page, Fast Widget Authoring, but I didn't really read it because it didn't think it pertained to DjAj's needs. Today I actually took the time to the page and... Damn... This is cool shit!. The first thing I thought was, "This looks a lot like how Django does things...". Dojo IS for Javascript, what Django is for Python web development. This is going to be big.

If you read the article, you will see what Dojo does. Basically it allows you to create packaged javascript components using html and css. No more, innerHTML-String Splicing crap, no more DOM appendChild, blah, blah, blah, well not as much anyhow.

I'm going to be playing with Dojo a little and most likely integrate Django Ajax with it. Happy Hacking...

Eric Moritz

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