If you are new to Dojo or want a quick overview of the toolkit then take a look at the HelloWorld Tutorial. This tutorial describes step by step how to build a simple Dojo application. You will learn some basic concepts about widgets, events and how to connect to the server code. Each step builds on the previous until you have a working application. It takes about an hour to go through the tutorial.
Dojo offers many editions of its code base. At first, it might seem daunting to try to figure out exactly which one you need. To quickly dispel any worries, let me assure you that every single edition of dojo provides a fully functioning system. Whether you download one of our editions, or the full, uncompressed source code, you'll be able to perform any of the examples discussed in this book.
TODO: fold in information from the READMEIn order to use dojo in your HTML pages, you need three sections of code, in this order:
1. Flags
<script type="text/javascript">
djConfig = { isDebug: false };
</script>
The flags control various options of dojo; often developers will set isDebug to true in order to get debugging output on their page. (There are also some other flags related to debugging; see the Debugging section of the code for details.)
2. Include the dojo bootstrap
<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/dojo/dojo.js"></script>
This includes the bootstrap section of dojo, and if you are using a release build, then dojo.js will also include code for some of the dojo modules.
3. Define what resources you are using
<script type="text/javascript">
dojo.require("dojo.event.*");
dojo.require("dojo.io.*");
dojo.require("dojo.widget.*");
</script>
This section is much like java's "import" statement. You specify every resources that you are using in your code. However, note that widgets are a special case and don't need to be declared explicitly, assuming that (as is the case with the built-in dojo widgets), a manifest file defines which widget is in which resource file.
Even though Dojo is made up of many different packages, it's frequently used in very specific ways. Because of this, we've created special editions of Dojo aimed toward these users. A visit to dojo's download page will show you which editions are currently available, such as the Ajax and Widget edition.
An edition is very simple, really. The important file is dojo.js, which is created by merging the most frequently used packages and compressing the resulting code. This means that when you have a script tag that calls dojo.js, you're getting not just the basic Dojo codebase, but the additional functionality that is most pertinent to your specific use.
You might wonder why so much additional code comes in each edition. This is the full code base, and allows you to use functionality that is outside of your specific build. It means that even if you have a very specifically tailored edition of Dojo, you aren't limited to only using that featureset. If your site uses the event and I/O systems heavily, but one of your pages uses a widget, then you don't have to worry that your widget will break. This also means that any of the examples in this book will work no matter what edition you've downloaded.