 | Level: Intermediate Karl Bishop (kfbishop@us.ibm.com), Senior Software Engineer, IBM
Doug Phillips (dougep@us.ibm.com), Advisory Software Engineer, IBM
28 Nov 2007 Today's users expect a lot of functionality in their Web applications. Portal application users are no exception. What is a portal developer to do? The answer: Use the Dojo toolkit to create compelling, interactive portal application user interfaces that excite your users. This entertaining article shows you how to configure, integrate, and leverage the Dojo Toolkit to make your portal applications that run on IBM® WebSphere® Portal V6 come alive!
In this article
- Understand your options for embedding Dojo into your portal application.
- Use custom Dojo-enabled themes.
- Follow specific steps to include Dojo capabilities in your portal application.
- Address specific application requirements for portals that use Dojo.
- Work with AJAX style ccommunications from portlets to host services.
- Build in internationalization capabilites.
- Add some style to your visual Dojo dijits.
- Work with Dojo events.
- Create custom modules.
- Learn by example, using the included downloadable code samples.
Background
Until recently, developers had to use proprietary plug-ins or secondary languages to add the type of Rich Internet Application (RIA) features that Web 2.0 users have come to expect in a Web application. These languages can be heavyweight, require installation by the user, and are often problematic in cross-browser and cross-platform environments.
With the explosion of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) toolkits, you can now provide full-featured applications on the browser using native and cross-browser JavaScript. There are several great AJAX toolkits available, and many of them are open source. This article focuses on the Dojo toolkit, which has a strong architecture, helpful accessibility and internationalization features, and a nice general feature set. If you hold allegiance to another toolkit, please read on; most of the issues discussed here generally apply to any AJAX toolkit.
Downloads | Description | Name | Size | Download method |
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| Article in PDF format | 0711_bishop-Dojo-and-WP6.pdf | 983 KB | HTTP |
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| Code samples | DojoPortal_pxi.zip | 167 KB | HTTP |
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About the authors | 
| | Karl Bishop is a Senior Software Engineer at IBM, working out of his home in the Sandhills of North Carolina. He leads an international team that works on several IBM portal based applications. Karl's technology focus areas are in Linux, virtualization, DHTML/AJAX, XML, WebSphere Portal and various IBM middleware products. |
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Doug Phillips is an Advisory Software Engineer for IBM's elite group of skilled professionals known as IBM's Web Enablement and Support team. He has worked in many organizations within IBM and currently designs and develops both internal and external WebSphere Portal applications using IBM middleware and Linux. Doug is WebSphere and DB2 certified. |
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