Dojo 1.7 was released this month, giving users early access to lots of features that are going to be standard in Dojo 2.0, due late 2012. We’ve already been using early releases of Dojo 1.7 since the summer in my day-to-day role with IBM working on Watson, as we wanted to take advantage of the new module format, better mobile support and much more. With 1.7 now available, I wanted to share my experiences using it on a real project, showing developers what new features are available, how they can use them and what advantages this brings.
Last week I gave an hour long presentation inside IBM to colleagues from the European and US Development Laboratories, sharing my experiences with Dojo 1.7 on the Watson project. The extended version of the slides are now available on slideshare.
The theme of the talk was that Dojo 1.7 provided an opportunity to start upgrading your project to use these (optional) new features today, migrating away from older features that are now deprecated and will be unsupported in 2.0. By beginning to move your codebase across now, the upgrade path to 2.0 will be straightforward and painless.