[sswezey]

I recently did a project using Dojo (1.7) and my coworker told me that it 'lost the war' against jQuery. Having worked with it, the documentation was absolutely horrid (which they no claim to have somewhat resolved). As for popularity, it is a Catch-22 - it's not used very often and so no one is willing to learn it and people don't learn it, so it's not used very often. From the same website showing jQuery is on 50% of websites now, you can see that Dojo is absolutely abysmal in popularity and usage:

http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library/...

[dylanks2]

Dojo is used in more than 80% of the world's 2000 largest companies. Yes, it's not the default toolkit for WordPress or other large blogging and microsite platforms (which dominate the number of sites on the web), but Dojo is used far more than the numbers indicate. For every 10,000 basic sites, there's an impressive app out there that makes use of it. As I've argued before, if Apple had given up to Microsoft because everyone used Windows, or if Firefox had given up because everyone used IE, the world would be a boring place. With AMD, it's less about Dojo vs. other toolkits, and more about how to use toolkits together in an efficient modular manner to build the app you need.

[sswezey]

Unfortunately, you cannot load Dojo with other AMD loaders. It has shims and features within its dojo.js that prevent's other loaders from being able to use it; dojo can load other AMD modules but not vice-versa.

Also, the comparison of FF/IE and Windows/Mac, the argument is flawed - the underdogs came out to fix problems with the status quo. Dojo does not provide significant benefit over jQuery or similar tools to warrant switching frameworks.

[amitu]

"Dojo does not provide significant benefit over jQuery or similar tools to warrant switching frameworks."

This is not correct at all. Compared to jquery, dojo is significantly better option for large projects. Dojo has a very rich unified set of widgets, jQuery has plugins, but they do not play well with each other. Each jQuery plugin is unique, with no standard way to extend them. I can extend any dojo class and in a very uniform fashion.

It is possible to do write good code in jQuery, but a vast majority of them are not, jQuery is like PHP, a haphazard mix of functions that do something. Dojo is like Django etc, with everything thought out from start to end, everything gels together.

Or at least that is my initial impression, would love to know why you believe the class system, the AMD modules, the rich widget library, storage framework, MVC framework, i18n, etc offered by dojo is no benefit to you?

[dylanks2]

The latter point is your opinion, but certainly many developers actually believe it does.

Dojo has plugins for localization and text loading that are needed for certain features. You would need similar capabilities in other AMD loaders for them to work. I believe it's simple enough to get most of Dojo working with RequireJS, or with Curl.