Dojo 1.4 Favorite Features

Dojo 1.4 is out! There is a metric ton of changes. Here are some of my favorite things about the release. I focus mostly on Dojo Core, and mostly in the non-animation parts of it, so my list is skewed for that focus. However, there are lots of other changes, some in the animation functionality, and in Dijit and Dojox. Check out the 1.4 release notes to get a more complete picture.

One of the things I want to do for Dojo Core is to bring the DOM APIs, particularly the methods on dojo.NodeList (the return object for dojo.query() calls, Dojo's CSS selector method) more in-line with what is available in jQuery. jQuery has demonstrated that its APIs resonate strongly with developers. Where it makes sense and fits Dojo's philosophy, we should also provide those APIs, to make it easier for developers. These Dojo 1.4 changes reflect that goal:

• dojo.ready(), just an alias for dojo.addOnLoad().
• dojo.NodeList-traverse: A helper module that adds methods to dojo.NodeList. Its goal is to bring in some methods to NodeList that exist in jQuery for DOM traversal, specifically: children, closest, parent, parents, siblings, next, nextAll, prev, prevAll, andSelf, first, last, even, odd.
• dojo.NodeList-manipulate: A helper module that adds methods to dojo.NodeList. Its goal is to bring in some methods to NodeList that exist in jQuery for DOM manipulation, specifically: innerHTML, html, text, val, append, appendTo, prepend, prependTo, after, insertAfter, before, insertBefore, remove, wrap, wrapAll, wrapInner, replaceWith, replaceAll, clone.
  
• IO pipeline topics: get notifications of IO events via dojo.subscribe/dojo.publish. Handy for putting up a generic "loading" indicator when any sort of IO call happens. These topics are not strictly how jQuery exposes this functionality, but we can leverage the power of dojo.publish/subscribe to implement this feature.

Some other new Dojo Core 1.4 features that are really sweet:

• dojo.cache(): allows you to reference external HTML files and use them as if they are strings. It is integrated into the build system, so you can avoid the XHR calls to get the external text files by just doing a build. No extra build option is needed. This is a great way to construct HTML -- by writing plain HTML instead of building awkward strings in code or using JS DOM-building calls, which can obscure what the HTML actually looks like.
  
• dojo.position(): A faster, more understandable replacement for dojo.coords(). If you were using dojo.coords() before, odds are good that you probably want to switch to dojo.position(). Douglas Hays stepped up and put in this great new method.
  
• dojo.declare(): It is faster and more robust. Many thanks to Eugene Lazutkin for doing this work. It took a lot of patience and perseverance to get this new version up to snuff and keep it backward compatible.
• dojo.hash(): An easy way to set the URL hash (fragment ID) and to watch changes to the hash. This allows you to create pages that reflect the proper state as shown by the URL in the browser. This was a contribution from community member Rob Retchless and other IBM Jazz team members.

For the build system, support was added for Google's Closure Compiler, so you can experiment with using it for minifying your code. Right now we just support the "simple" minification done by Closure Compiler, not the advanced features.

It was a little while coming, but it is great to have Dojo 1.4 out. Thanks to the community for making the toolkit better!