The Dojo Foundation Releases Dojo 1.0

Open Source Toolkit Provides Critical Components for Web 2.0 Development



PALO ALTO, CA.- The Dojo Foundation is proud to announce version 1.0 of Dojo, an Open Source JavaScript toolkit for Ajax development that can be used to build rich Web 2.0 applications..

Dojo provides easy-to-use, high-quality UI components and JavaScript infrastructure critical for building responsive Web applications without the need for proprietary plugins or single-vendor solutions. Only 25K in size, the base of Dojo delivers key support for Ajax, progressive enhancement, animations, and opens the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers.

The Dojo project has attracted a talented and vibrant community of individuals and corporate supporters since its founding in 2004. Dojo is a key part of products from active community members like AOL, BEA (NASDAQ: BEAS), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA), and many others.

IBM uses Dojo in a number of products including WebSphere Commerce and its popular mashup maker, QEDWiki. “Dojo enabled IBM to create user interfaces that are internationalized and accessible out of the box, which helps us to deliver projects much faster and with more value to our customers,” said David Boloker, CTO for Emerging Technologies, IBM Software Group. “And now we will be delivering the Dojo Toolkit in a WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for Web 2.0, so that our customers can build rich Web 2.0 style applications using J2EE.”

“Congratulations to the entire Dojo community in reaching the 1.0 milestone,” said Dylan Schiemann, CEO of SitePen, Inc., and co-founder of the Dojo project. “Dojo 1.0 enables developers and designers to more easily collaborate to build attractive, rich web interfaces. SitePen proudly offers Dojo development, training, and support services. The feature set makes it a natural choice for the rich, customized applications our customers demand.”

The Dojo Toolkit is comprised of three pieces. Dojo Core provides functionality missing from today’s web browsers and helps overcome browser “quirks.” Dijit is a collection of rich user interface controls which are skinnable and have global reach through accessible technologies and internationalization. DojoX provides native vector graphics, charting, offline mode, and Comet support, and many more key community extensions to Dojo.

Dojo 1.0 includes:

* Accessibility including keyboard navigation, low vision support, and ARIA markup for assistive technologies
* High performance grid widget supporting 100,000+ rows of data
* Browser-native 2-D and 3-D charting
* A full library of easy-to-use, attractive UI controls
* Universal data access for simple and fast data-driven widget development
* Internationalization with localizations provided for 13 major languages
* CSS-driven themes to make customization and extension simple
* Dojo Offline, based on Google Gears, which makes offline applications easy to build
* Support for the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits
* Native 2-D and 3-D vector graphics drawing
* Access to many more widgets and extensions through the Dojo package system

“The Dojo Foundation has made it easy for AOL to contribute code back to the Dojo community, particularly in the area of high performance code loading,” said James Burke, Lead Software Design Engineer at AOL. “We continue to make Dojo releases available from AOL’s content delivery network, free for the community to use which means you don’t even have to download the toolkit to start using it. The Dojo community has made a great toolkit that can be used at both ends of the development spectrum. It enables feature-rich, component-based web applications, like AOL’s Webmail and myAOL™ personal home pages. The Dojo Toolkit is very capable in more constrained environments too, as illustrated by TinyBuddy IM, an AIM® Enabled instant messaging web application for the iPhone.”

“The Dojo Foundation has been a great partner and a terrific working community,” said Ed, Cobb, vice president, Emerging Technology and Standards, BEA Systems. “We use the Dojo toolkit today in AquaLogic Pages, our business user mash-up platform, and also encourage developers to use the Dojo toolkit to develop their own dynamic applications for use with our WebLogic products. BEA recently expanded its involvement with Dojo technology by becoming a member of the Dojo Foundation. As such, BEA can now leverage many of the native core features of the Dojo 1.0 toolkit in many of our products.”

“Dojo has been deployed in production systems for more than two years, and the breadth and maturity of Dojo 1.0 really shows the care taken by all of the project’s contributors in building better experiences for everyone,” said Alex Russell, Project Lead for the Dojo Toolkit. “Dojo 1.0 gives developers and designers fluid ways to iterate on designs and complex, data-driven behaviors. Dojo’s architecture lets teams easily build themeable, modular, responsive interfaces that can be easily localized and optimized for deployment.”

“The release of Dojo 1.0 is an important industry event. The Dojo Foundation is a member of the OpenAjax Alliance Steering Committee, is active on multiple OpenAjax committees, and has participated in both of our InteropFest events,” said Jon Ferraiolo, Secretary of the OpenAjax Alliance. “We are very happy that Dojo 1.0 includes the OpenAjax Hub as this will promote the ability for application developers to combine Dojo with other Ajax toolkits within the same web application.”

Dojo can be downloaded today from http://dojotoolkit.org and is made available under the commercially friendly BSD and AFL licenses.