Ok, I don’t really have any authority or any involvement whatsoever with jDojo but I figured I would introduce it on my site. I am going to be checking it out more closely going forward and seeing what benefit it really gives us.
You will need to register to get into the jDojo site so go ahead – I think it is well worth it. The latest version now has support for Dojo 1.4 – which tells me these guys are making sure the community has the ability to support very current API’s. I didn’t get to see the EclipseCon session Michael gave but it looked very interesting and also gives a great summary of what jDojo is.
“The programmer does not program against the Java JDK classes, but against Dojo and JavaScript stubs that JDojo provides.”
I would really like to see a good comparison to how jDojo compares to GWT and the advantages and disadvantages of both – I have some high level ideas but it is clear these two projects are attempting to do something similar (make web 2.0 development easier). It is very clear that large enterprise JavaScript applications are a bear to manage and tools like these kinds of tools make it very easy to quickly create cross browser applications based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The thing I love best about jDojo is the code you write looks almost exactly like JavaScript so you aren’t really “compiling” per say. The benefits you get are typed programming and error checking right within Eclipse. From the main page of the jDojo site here is a summary of the key benefits:
The benefits in summary..
- The JDojo programmer can now write its Web UI code using the features of the Eclipse Java tooling.
- The JDojo compiler ensure that correct Dojo and JavaScript code is generated (no missing/unnecessary commas, brackets etc) but also automatically handles things like the list of ‘required’ statements.
- Type information is now part of the code, and not of the documentation anymore.
- The programmer still deals with the DOM, browser environment etc, having the full control over all the details.
- Existing code can be easily integrated by writing a JDojo stub for it.
- The generated JavaScript code matches the style of the existing code and can co-exist easily in the same project.