defineWidget - JotSpot Wiki (dojo)

The Dojo team has cleverly defined their architecture in such a way that defineWidget can take HTML, SVG, and other renderer types when defining a new widget. So a widget developer can elect to support a couple different renderers for a component.

When a user sidles up to a web page using that component, Dojo can sniff what browser he is using to view it, assess its capabilities, and choose the right renderer to render that component in the best way possible.

Here is something from the Dojo wiki that helps clarify that a little. To really understand, go to its page, and read the whole page so you can get the context - and the examples.

defineWidget - JotSpot Wiki (dojo):

Widgets can have different versions for different renders. (In practical terms, this means that there can be an SVG version of a widget for Firefox, and a VML version for IE)

Technorati tags: dojo, svg, vml, web, component, programming, html

Brian McCallister

Already, AJAX has become super popular.

Ways of defining your own HTML/Javascript components (web page widgets) are coming along more slowly.

Dojo is a Javascript library that makes creating reusable, DHTML-aware components a lot easier to do. Its makers just streamlined the process of creating Dojo widgets way simpler than it used to be.

Brian McCallister:

There are quite a few good bare-bones introductions to Dojo widgets out there, but not a lot beyond the Hello World stuff. Here is a bit, as I find it and figure some of it out...

The recent 0.3 release added an amazingly convenient method for creating new widgets, dojo.widget.defineWidget, which I'll use for al my widget making -- it is just that much nicer =)

Technorati tags: dojo, html, ajax, component, dhtml, javascript

Many of the sites I am using are already AJAX

Websites like Amazon, the 43* sites (43 Things, 43 People, 43 Places, All Consuming, Lists of Bests), Digg, Yahoo, Google, and so forth have been AJAX for a pretty long time - looking back.

And it really has not been all that long since the first articles came out mentioning AJAX.


AJAX has caught on faster than most computing technologies I can recall, save HTML itself.

Part of the reason for that rapid adoption was the web was already dry tinder, just waiting for the spark that was AJAX.

People already wanted a fast, powerful, breathtaking, lightweight, easy-to-program, modeless GUI technology for web pages. Browsers already had the technology needed to pull it off too. It had been slumbering in them for years.

Flash, the way it grabs the CPU sometimes in a headlock certainly and makes bookmarking forms difficult - is not quite it, sometimes. Java applets, when they cause a delay in page loading or are difficult to weave into a page - are not quite it, sometimes. Regular HTML forms, the ultimate modal interface, sometimes are totally not it.


AJAX came along, and like Charlie in Charlie's Angels took them away from all that.

And the users?

They are happy!