A group of JavaScript developers starting talking about the future of DHTML. Alex Russell (original creator of NetWindows), in looking for assistance at Informatica, started talking to many of the members of the DHTML community, culminating in the April 25, 2004 email titled "Selling the future of DHTML". David Schontzler (Stilleye) spent a summer working at Informatica, and Dylan Schiemann (currently at SitePen) also joined Informatica. The first lines of code contributed to Dojo were done by Alex and Dylan with the support of Informatica. There were many other community members that were active participants in shaping the direction of Dojo, including Joyce Park (mod_pubsub), Tom Trenka (creator of f(m)), Mark Anderson (bustlib), Leonard Lin (who suggested the name Dojo), Aaron Boodman (YoungPup, before GreaseMonkey and Google), Simon Willison (before Django, now at Flickr), Cal Henderson (Flickr), and Dan Pupius (animation, now at Google).



After several months of discussions on the ng-dhtml (now dojo-developer) mailing list about licensing, choosing a name, coding conventions, build tools, server configuration, and requirements (what would this Dojo thing actually become), we began writing code and setting up a foundation to own the copyright to the Dojo code. After writing some initial specs, the first Dojo code was written and/or ported into Dojo in early September, 2004, by Alex Russell and Dylan Schiemann. In addition to new code, early contributions and inspirations were made from NetWindows, burstlib, and f(m). In March, 2005, we started to receive contribtions from other Dojo members, and by the end of 2006, we have completed four major releases, with over 300,000 downloads to date, and contributions from more than 60 developers and companies.



The Dojo Foundation was established in 2005 as a 501c(6) organization. Currently, Alex Russell serves as the president, and Dylan Schiemann is the Secretary/Treasurer. Voting of issues is done by +1/-1 by the contributor mailing list.



Over the first two years since that initial e-mail discussion, Dojo has grown in a manner that we could have only dreamed of. Through several major releases, and extensive contributions by the community, Dojo has become a much more diverse and flexible toolkit in a shorter amount of time than any of its predecessors. We were originally just hoping to build a toolkit that would learn from the limitations of toolkits of the day, make real use of DOM-capable browsers, and build something with real capabilities and a real software engineering approach. Our goal was to avoid reinventing the wheel so that we could move on and make new mistakes.