Dig into Dojo: DOM Basics

Dojo is officially called the Dojo Toolkit. This is actually very fitting. Most other collections of lines of JavaScript available bill themselves as frameworks or libraries. A framework is a more or less end-to-end solution for building good web applications, and a library is a collection of tools that assist you with a few specific (usually related) tasks. Dojo fits into both categories, and then some. It’s got all the DOM manipulation, events and animation helpers, and AJAX functions that you’d get with a library like jQuery. But there’s more, much more.

• Dojo Core: Dojo Core is the main, base functionality. Most of it is the kind of thing you’d get with jQuery. However, it also holds dozens of general-purpose language utilities, as well as the plumbing for the other parts of Dojo.
• Dijit: Dijit is the UI library of Dojo; it’s an official sub-project, managed by separate people. In that way, it’s similar to jQuery UI. A lot of the functionality is similar to the kind of things you’d find in the jQuery UI Widgets library as well: Calendar pickers, combo boxes, and buttons. If you want to crank up your web forms a notch, you’ll find almost everything you need in Dijit. Dijit also contains some interesting layout tools.
• DojoX: DojoX (Dojo extensions) is a collection of individual projects that, you guessed it, extend Dojo. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that, “there a Dojo extension for that.” Incredible charting utilities? Check. Every type of data store you’d ever want, and then some? You bet. Even more form helpers to boost the ones available in Dijit? It’s here. It’s all here.