This one has been a long time coming. Nine months of non-stop development, a few new committers and nearly 1000 closed issues cumulatively creates the team’s fastest, most stable Dojo release to date. Finally the Dojo team announced the release of Dojo 1.4 which has improvements in performance and stability as well as new features. While this release is primarily a stability and performance release, team has added a quite a bit of great new functionality into the release.All the significant changes have been outlined in the 1.4 release notes (including migration issues), and are far too numerous to list here: ranging from simple convenience changes, like dojo.Animation callbacks now being passed the node being animated, to completely new APIs like dojo.cache providing build interning outside of of dijit._Templated. Some changes are simply exposing long standing “private” API’s: dojo._Animation is public as dojo.Animation now and dojo._contentHandlers has become dojo.contentHandlers exposing Ajax transport configuration for advanced users and giving an official commitment to the preservation of those APIs.
As always, Dojo 1.4 should be completely backwards compatible with previous versions of Dojo. If you happen upon a migration issue not covered in the release notes and not discovered during the beta/release-candidate stages of Dojo 1.4, please file a ticket. Any unspotted regressions will be fixed in 1.4.1 for immediate deployment.

What are the highlights for you in this release?

  • IO Pipeline topics
  • dojo.cache
  • dojo.contentHandlers
  • dojo.hash with native HTML5 onhashchange event support where available
  • Traversal and manipulation for NodeLists (the return value for dojo.query)
  • dojo.ready (easier to type than dojo.addOnLoad)
  • Hundreds of refinements to the Dijit API and collection of Dijits, and a few new widgets in DojoX
  • DataChart widget and other improvements to charting
  • dojox.drawing lands!
  • Editor improvements and new plug-ins in both Dijit and DojoX
  • Grid is faster, and the EnhancedGrid lands!
  • ForestStoreModel for the TreeGrid
  • GFX improvements
  • dojox.jq, a very experimental module aimed at trying to match the jQuery API as close as possible, but using Dojo underneath
  • Dojo build system optionally supports the Google Closure Tools compiler
  • Significant speed improvements, especially in IE
The major grid improvements and enhancements, and the introduction of dojox.drawing are very impressive, as well as major core improvements in IE performance all around

Tags: ,