[Cosmo-dev] Dojo 0.9 (was Re: [Fwd: Re: HSV conversion code])

[Nicola Piccinini]

Hi,

I'm still lurking sometimes in your list, especially when "dojo" is in 
the subject.

> Preface: Moving conversation to the list per Matthew's suggestion. For 
> those that didn't see, Dojo released their latest and greatest today, a 
> large, backwards incompatible change that will definitely require a 
> non-trivial chunk of developer time when we do upgrade. Now onto the 
> meat...

I've just ported a bunch of code from 0.4 to 0.9 and I like to share 
some brief considerations, in the hope that they could be interesting:

  * most of the job consists of searching and replacing some common 
patterns, for example: widget declaration and creation, second argument 
in topic publishing method (that now is an array), etc.. It's boring but 
easy;
  * "exotic" usage of the dom node used in widget creation can cause 
problems because it seems that dojo 0.9 substitutes it with a new source 
dom node. In such cases a slightly refactoring is usually needed;
  * what I initially missed more was the unavailability of 
debugAtAllCosts and writeIncludes() but luckily the same problem 
(debugging evaled code) is solved in a better way by Fireclipse ( 
http://fireclipse.xucia.com/ );
  * some features are missing in dojo 0.9 but usually they could be done 
in another way or one can solve the problem copying and adapting the 
right functions from 0.4.

After (to be honest) a lot of work I've completely refactored my 
application that consists approximatively in 15 widgets and 25 other 
javascript source file (divided into two modules).

Unfortunately I can't yet evaluate any performance gain because I'm 
having problem with the build system and the flattening of localization 
bundles and I'm not able to build a working release :-( . Anyway:
  * the size of the new release file is about 30% less than with dojo 
0.4 (but the optimization used by default in dojo 0.9 is better than the 
one used by dojo 0.4 and the comparison isn't completely fair).
  * rendering seems a lot faster in 0.9 respect to 0.4 (no numbers, just 
feelings).

In conclusion, it seems that the porting to dojo 0.9 has improved my 
application performance but the gain isn't so impressive. In my opinion 
it's better to promptly follow the evolution of the library, so I 
believe that it's worth to upgrade anyway.

Bye,
Nicola

PS: for who is curious: I discontinued the development my application 
based also on Cosmo. It's not a definitive stop, I'm reorganizing the 
project but I can't do any prevision.