updating dojo

Hi,
I see that the version of dojo distributed with mango is ver 0.4.2. from March 2007. The latest release is version 1.2.3 and is a few days old.

I have trouble with the Tree in point hierarchy when I am selecting multiple points and dragging them into folders. My firefox CPU usage goes to 100% and it freezes for a little while. I know the the tree widget and drag'n'drop have had a re-write since 0.4.2, maybe around 0.9.

Have you thought about updating to a newer version of dojo? I know the latest version isn't backwards compatible to 0.4.2 so it probably wouldn't be straight forward.

It's not straightforward at all. In fact, after several hours of attempting to upgrade a few weeks back it was uncerimoniously abandoned. We might try again in the near future but there are no definite plans.

oh. What kind of road blocks did you run in to? Was it going to require some major changes in mango?

I don't recall at the moment, but i became clear that it was going to take more than a few hours to make the changes. And then there's hours of testing and such too...

I also attempted this update to dojo. What a pain! the latest version of dojo doesn't even support all of the functionality of the .4.3 dojo. I got a few pages upgraded but then I realized that the new version wasn't really an upgrade at all. It was a step backward for instance you can't put html in labels for the tree widget in the latest version. There where alot of things that you just couldn't do. So I abandoned that as well.

The whole experience really turned me off from dojo.

Are there future plans for the removal of dojo or replacement? Or to early to tell?

No plans. The fact is that for now, dojo works, and there are a lot of other functionality requests to consider first.

I've re-arranged some of the dojo.requires so that I could use the AOL dojo CDN and I've also found that firefox 3.1 and Chrome are both much faster at manipulating the tree on the hierarchy page when there are hundreds of points. So much faster that I haven't bothered to investigate why it gets sluggish to begin with.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 03/03/2009 18:42:03

I looked into the CDN thing too, but we couldn't be sure that Mango wouldn't be put behind a firewall or on a private network or something, and so didn't implement it. Nice work though.

I created a filter which sets variables in the session that control whether the Dojo is served from the CDN or from the local server.

The filter sets the variable to serve dojo locally if the client IP is on the same subnet and from AOL CDN if not.

It works 98% but sometimes I get an error in Parse.xd which can be worked around by reloading the page so I think there is some problem with the asynchronous loading of dojo packages i have to track down.

My app has around 300 point and I tried to use the hierarchy page to arrange them but it was just to painful.. Firefox 3.1 you say is much better? I normally use 3.0.6 is there javascript improvements in 3.1 over 3.0.6?

Yep, Firefox 3.1 has a just-in-time javascript engine:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/tracemonkey_javascript_lightsp.html

There are reports that jquery could be a suitable replacement for dojo. Just throwing this out there in case anyone's got some free time.

it's a pretty low priority for me as long as I can get the Dojo AOL CDN working properly.

It is odd that the newest versions of dojo aren't on par for features with 0.4. I've only heard good things about jquery though.