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

[Matthew Eernisse]

Nicola,

Thanks very much for the information. Having some real-world data from 
someone who's ported an app is really, really helpful for us trying to 
figure out when to make the jump.

Without a major performance improvement, I don't think we need to 
upgrade right away -- although I agree with Travis that we shouldn't 
rule it out in the Cosmo 0.8 timeframe. Seems like the layered builds 
could be beneficial to us, particularly if we can figure a way to do 
lazy loading of that code.

My biggest concern here is not so much the amount of work needed to do 
the conversion. I think our biggest risks in the conversion are:

1. Instability/bugginess

Dojo 0.9 is a big rewrite/refactoring, so I'd rather watch all the bugs 
shake out before using it.

2. Rework time and effort

It seems like they're still moving stuff around, and given our limited 
resources it would be nice to keep the rework for the conversion to a 
minimum. My suspicion is that there will be a lot less change after Dojo 
1.0.

Given the psychological importance of the 1.0 number, there will be 
other organizations who are waiting -- and I'm sure the Dojo guys are 
aware that things will have to settle post-1.0. (In fact, that seems to 
be the reason for jumping directly from 0.4.x to 0.9 -- so they can show 
a "production grade" release with the number 1.0.)

Anyhow, thanks for continuing to lurk :) -- and for sharing this info 
from your upgrade experience. It's sincerely appreciated.


Matthew

p.s. Nicola, when you say "'exotic' usage of the dom node used in widget 
creation," do you mean our use of that dummy DOM node so that the widget 
parser doesn't use document.body? Have they fixed that issue?



Nicola Piccinini wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> cosmo-dev mailing list
> cosmo-dev at lists.osafoundation.org
> http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/cosmo-dev
>