I want this series to be eye-opening for all the JavaScript developers who think Dojo died a few years back with it’s pre 0.9 days. The 0.9 release of Dojo brought fourth a fresh new start that provided huge increases in speed and stability. Since then, Dojo has blossomed into a full-fledged enterprise ready toolkit that is backed by an awesome community. If the last time you looked at Dojo was back in the pre 0.9 days (early 2007 and before), stop and check it out. Follow this series of posts to see for yourself the power that you can harness in your websites and applications.“these top quality developers know the ins and outs of JavaScript”

Dojo’s community is a special one. Drop by the #dojo IRC channel at irc.freenode.net to be greeted by a group of people who are there to welcome you and answer any questions you have. The best part is, they really know what they are talking about. These top quality developers know the ins and outs of JavaScript incredibly well and prove it when approached with questions. They are quick to provide examples, offer advice, and never talk down to anybody that drops by, seeking help. The developers of the toolkit are often on the channel to provide direct support but everyone else is also excellent and will help you out anyway they can.

In the coming weeks as this series progresses, you’ll see so many more aspects that make Dojo an excellent choice when considering your JavaScript library / toolkit of choice. This is only the beginning.

The Dojo Campus provides a wealth of documentation, tutorials for all levels, Dojo Cookies (kind of like recipes), and demos of cool features.

Below are just a handful of tutorials that are available to beginners in Dojo that really help you get started.

1. Dojo and Air, a fancy file uploader
   How many times have you had trouble uploading files to your favorite CMS? How many times did a client say “I am not happy with uploading one file at a time”? And last but not least, how many times did you implement a third party plugin/software/piece of magic to implement efficient file uploading?
   View tutorial >>
   
2. Fancy Rounded Corners
   Make great looking rounded corners on your elements using only a single image.
   View tutorial >>
   
3. Easily listen for events
   Custom events and Dom Events are all well and good for method-to-method functionality. It is a really common use case to connect some event happening to call another function, but when you get into really ambiguous, large applications, you need some mechanism to just say “hey, something has happened, act accordingly” … dojo.publish and dojo.subscribe provide just that mechanism.
   View tutorial >>
4. Rounded tabs with themes
   Everybody likes rounded buttons, rounded page elements and last but not least, rounded tabs. Fortunately dijit comes with great theming possibilities, so I will show you how you can make your own fancy rounded tabs using a simple image sprite and a couple of CSS classes.
   View tutorial >>
5. Separating Content from Presentation
   One of the cool things about Dojo is the dojo.xhrGet() function. It’s powerful because it makes transparent the browser dependent transports that make AJAX possible. In this cookie, we’re going to explore a simple use case in Dojo to separate content from the presentation of a page.
   View tutorial >>
   
   

I decided a Captivate tutorial would demonstrate this best, so without further delay, here is the tutorial URL:
http://www.kylehayes.info/captivate/QueryToDatagrid/QueryToDataGrid.htm