Have you ever written JavaScript that injects values into the middle of a string? Did you slice, substring, and RegExp your way to victory? You probably did. Unless great care is taken, this approach is fragile and produces code that is almost certainly difficult to read. Dojo provides help for this problem via an incredibly convenient utility for performing parametrized substitutions on a string, dojo.string.substitute.

I’m in love with YQL. Never heard of it? I’m not surprised. To borrow a term from the hip-hop community, YQL is probably the most slept-on technology in the field of Front End Engineering. In a nutshell, YQL lets you query for interesting data that can be easily consumed by a web app. In this article, I’ll show you how to dynamically inject data from YQL queries into your apps using Dojo.

Many developers with a background in Software Engineering are drawn to Dojo because of its ability to simulate classical type declaration and inheritance structures via dojo.declare. Specifying a ‘class’ via dojo.declare is straight-forward, but an extremely common mistake involves the accidental declaration of a ‘static field’ (i.e. a class variable) when intending to declare an instance variable.

The other day, I was working on a Dojo-based project and was paring down a JavaScript array using the ultra-slick dojo.filter function. As I was effortlessly discarding the unwanted array elements, I had the thought, “Man, I really could have used dojo.filter when I was trying to get rid of those Busch beers!”. The revelation at the handiness of dojo.filter made me realize that the Dojo array functions deserve a blog post of their own. And what better contrived data set than an array of beers?

The Dojo DataGrid is the Super Bowl of widgets. Newcomers flock to it! Everyone wants one on their page, but it is not easy to win the Super Bowl, nor is it easy to conquer the Grid.

When you use a JavaScript library, does this mean that your days of browser-specific issues are over? Should you just test your code in the latest version of Chrome and call it a day? Of course not. There still exists an entire class of programming errors that introduce bugs that only appear in certain browsers. Of these problems, none of them are more sinister than……..the Trailing Comma of Death.

For enterprise applications an internationalization story is not ‘nice to have’; it is an absolute must. Rolling your own solution for i18n concerns is not out of the realm of possibilities for a good team of developers, but it’s certainly not something you want to do if you can avoid it. Dojo provides a battle-tested and elegant solution for i18n out-of-the-box. Use it.

We will explore how to ‘bind’ a widget property to a DOM node. That is, we will configure our widget to listen for changes in its properties and automatically update the relevant DOM nodes when a change occurs.

Enterprise Web Applications are full of common UI elements and functionality that are ripe to be encapsulated into a reusable widget. Lucky for you, Dojo makes this process easy. The resulting code is cohesive and modular, just the way we like it.

The typical beginning of an Enterprise Developer’s JavaScript education is involuntary in nature. In many cases an engineer with a strong background in Java, or other strongly-typed languages, is informed that their next project requires JavaScript. Like all forced actions, this will be a bumpy road. So bumpy in fact, that the Enterprise Developer will go through a grieving process as they leave behind their beloved strongly-typed language and plunge into the duck-typed world of JavaScript. This process of grief has four distinct stages.