Custom local variables using the Dojo Loader

Recently, Dion Almaer was wishing for a way to avoid typing "dojo" so many times in the Bespin code. He appreciated the namespace protection that Dojo gave, but did not like the typing tax that came with it. He talked to Alex and Pete about it. Alex suggested a way, but it is very experimental.

Here is another way that leverages the strength of the Dojo Loader.

The Dojo Loader handles the work of loading your JavaScript modules. When you do a dojo.require("foo.bar"), the loader figures out that you want to load the foo/bar.js file and loads it for you. Normally the loader uses a synchronous XMLHttpRequest (XHR) call to load the file and uses eval() to bring the code into existence.

There is an xdomain loader that does not use eval, and allows your code to be loaded from any domain (with dependencies properly loaded), but it requires a build step using the Dojo build tools.

Both versions of the loader (normal and xdomain) allow you to namespace your code -- so you can map dojo to mydojo, and even your own code to some other name. This allows you to load multiple versions of dojo and/or your code in a page. Nifty.

The Loader is able to support this scope mapping by wrapping your module in a function call like so:

(function(dojo, dijit, dojox){
 //Module code injected in here
})(dojo, dijit, dojox);

We can use this new scope created by this function to create local variables for your module.

Dojo's Loader can be modified to allow you to specify a set of local variable names that get injected with this function wrapping. And we can do this on a per-module prefix basis, so your code can have your own local variables, but some other module can specify a different set.

I did a prototype that works as follows: assume "coolio" is the namespace I use for my modules. I create a coolio.locals that has the following content:

dojo.provide("coolio.locals");

dojo.setLocalVars("coolio", {
 trim: "dojo.hitch(dojo, 'trim')",
 $: "dojo.hitch(dojo, 'query')",
 id: "dojo.hitch(dojo, 'byId')"
});

This code will create local variables called trim, $ and id that map to dojo.query, dojo.byId and dojo.trim respectively, but only for coolio* modules.

Then I have another module, called coolio.actions that uses these variables:

dojo.provide("coolio.actions");

coolio.actions = {
 init: function(){
  $("#trimButton").onclick(coolio.actions, function(evt){
   id("trimOutput").value = trim(id("trimOutput").value);
  });
 }
}

Notice that trim, id and $ were not declared in here. The final bit of magic is to use djConfig.require in the HTML page to auto-load the coolio.locals module before any other coolio code, so that the loader knows to create the local variables for any coolio.* module:

<script type="text/javascript" src="dojo/dojo.js" djConfig="require: ['coolio.locals']"><script>

See it in action with this sample page.

I created ticket #9032 to track the possibility of allowing this in the future. It also has the patch that can be applied to the Dojo source to get it to work. Or, if you are using Dojo 1.3.0, you can grab these built files with the changes: dojo.js or dojo.js.uncompressed.js

There are some caveats to this prototype:
1) We really need a build step that would inline the local variables for your build layers, so the code as-is will not work with custom build layers.
2) Does not work with xdomain builds yet, another tweak to the build system is needed for that.

If you think this might be useful for you, feel free to add your comments to the issue tracker entry or leave a comment.