A look at Dojo 2

I like Dojo. It’s a solid toolkit that’s been around a long time.

I’ve had my share of hair-pulling when it comes to integrating Dojo with other JavaScript tooling like SystemJS and Webpack, each time finding some sort of workaround. And yeah, Dijit is getting a little long in the tooth. Long in the tooth. What the hell does that even mean?

Anyway, I’ve been patiently awaiting a release of Dojo 2 for quite a while now and it looks like we are getting closer than ever to that moment. The core Dojo 2 packages are now in beta1 and they have a new site up with a groovy new logo.

At one point, I had decided to try out the new dojo-cli, although back then it didn’t do anything, at least I couldn’t get it to work. But that has recently changed, as the cli can now scaffold a basic Dojo 2 application with widgets and everything. You can get all the deets on getting started with Dojo 2 in the new tutorial pages. I wonder if they are just going to call it Dojo and refer to Dojo 1 as Dojo 1, kind of how Angular is doing? naming things is hard

In this video, I take a quick look at the new site and some info on the current roadmap. I fumble around with the cli as I try to build an app with an old version of the cli tools (I do upgrade during the video), but we get everything up and running. And of course, I have to integrate the ArcGIS API 4 for JavaScript with the esri-loader.

I’m excited for what Dojo 2 brings to the table in application design. I’m excited that it’s all in TypeScript and that it includes some neat toys like typed CSS and theming. I look forward to a solid 1.0 release!