Every year, Esri, the world’s largest geospatial software vendor, runs its developer summit in Europe. This conference, the Esri EU DevSummit, attracts around 350 developers working with Esri technology from across Europe, all coalescing in Berlin. Attendees come to find out the latest in Esri tech updates and technology changes at large that affect them as geospatial developers.
The Dojo Toolkit, a framework founded by Sitepen, has been a core part of Esri’s JavaScript mapping API offering, the ArcGIS JavaScript API, for many years now. At SitePen, we have been working on a new framework, called simply Dojo.
James Milner, one of our software developers from London, attended the conference to give a talk for Esri developers on “Building a Modern JavaScript Framework.” In this talk, James laid down the history of the ArcGIS JavaScript API and why the Dojo Toolkit was chosen as its bedrock. At the time of inception, the Dojo Toolkit provided many appealing features, such as a module system, browser compatibility for APIs, and a uniform surface for handling vector graphics with dojo.gfx. James explained how that in more recent times, the ecosystem has developed and the challenges developers face has also changed in response. You can see his slide presentation here:
As such, Dojo was built to tackle these challenges, providing reactive programming patterns, state management, and support for new web features like Progressive Web Apps and Custom Elements. Dojo can work with the ArcGIS JavaScript API using Esri Loader, with a demo available on GitHub.
To learn more about Dojo, check out dojo.io.
If you enjoyed reading about James’ Esri presentation and would like to talk more about choosing a framework or architecture that’s right for you, let’s connect!