Why choose Dojo

Choosing a platform for your Ajax applications isn’t a trivial task. There are more choices than you have had hot dinners, and new ones pop up on a daily basis. If a framework wants adoption, it helps to have a story on why a developer should choose that library.

Dojo has just gone out and written up its thoughts on why you may want to choose their framework, which includes the following analysis, and a set of comparisons to Prototype, jQuery, Ext, MochiKit, GWT, and YUI. Give it a read, and let us know your thoughts.

Breadth and Depth: Dojo is the “full stack”. Instead of cobbling together components from several different sources, Dojo allows each component to build on a trusted set of high-quality building blocks by providing integrated infrastructure and a wide variety of optional modules. These components provide good solutions to common user experience problems and can be easily tweaked to meet your needs. From pane-based layouts to client-side charting and graphing to data binding to a time-tested module system, Dojo is solid infrastructure for delivering great experiences.
Quality: Infrastructure for internationalization and accessibility is woven through the entire fabric of Dojo. Keystrokes are hinted correctly. The components all fit together as a cohesive whole. Everything is customizable easily with CSS, but very little needs to be tweaked to get a great looking UI nearly everywhere. These are the hallmarks of a system which has been designed and tested to deliver great experiences, not only to users, but also to designers and developers.

Performance: Dojo is used on high-profile, high-traffic sites every day and Dojo’s build tools are a key reason why. Dojo’s package system makes it easy to manage large-scale UI development projects and the build system layers on top to make your applications scream; all without code changes. Dojo also packs high-performance implementations of common utilties into its core, and the rebuild of Dojo for 0.9 focuses heavily on performance and reduced code footprint. The result is a small, tight toolkit that is blazing fast. Dojo’s performance alone makes it an ideal platform to extend and build on.

Community: Dojo is an open community. As a result many individuals and companies have been able to come together on a level playing field to build tools that benefit everyone. The licensing of the toolkit is designed to be as apolitical as possible and we work hard to ensure that getting your itches scratched is easy if you are willing to get involved. All development happens in the open and the barriers to entry are intentionally very low. We don’t care where you work or how “qualified” you are, all we care is that you want to build products that makes user experiences better. Designer or developer or doc writer, the community Dojo values contributions of every kind and position in the community is commensurate with the quality of the work you do, not political wrangling. We’re working to change the notions of who can be contributors in Open Source and we invite you to join us in charting a new path. If you want to build a great product and think you can help us, we want to hear from you.

source: ajaxian.com